"Yojimbo is the most entertaining movie ever made. Kurosawa’s flat-out entertaining. He said “I wanna make a movie that’s delicious enough to eat,” and that’s the way it is — it’s the most entertaining movie you can possibly think of. It’s been redone, as you know, as Fistful of Dollars, and it owes a lot to Red Harvest: It’s about any stranger that comes in to a corrupt town, and there are a lot forces at work. It’s very much like Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett’s novel, in which he puts all the bad forces at work against each other. Yojimbo is hilarious. Toshirô Mifune in as great a role as he ever played, and he’s great in about 20 Kurosawa films. It’s just delightful from first shot, which is him walking along the road and then deciding where to go by throwing a stick up in the air and following the direction the stick lands, and he immediately comes upon a peasant boy who’s leaving home and wants a more exciting life, and that boy is seen throughout the film as he becomes involved in the criminal element in town; and at the end Mifune spares his life and tells him to go back to eating rice or whatever he’s complained about at the very beginning. The photography is phenomenal. Kurosawa’s the greatest filmmaker of all time. The use of lenses, the mise en scène — absolutely spectacular."

"I shamefully saw this study in maritime lunacy on one of those industry links that emit noxious gas from your computer if you dare to forward to anyone. I was about to do a joint interview with Robert Eggers for MovieMaker magazine, hence the link, and was pretty excited given how much I loved “The Witch.” “The Lighthouse” is unlike anything I’ve seen. Willem Dafoe reminded me a lot of a security guard I worked with at Trollope & Colls joinery in Reading many moons ago. It was that look in the eye from someone who saw too much of what was in their head. That’s something I instantly recognized and it brought me right back to the gates of that joinery. There were too many similarities — the pride in the job, the obsessive attention to detail, the authoritarian streak and the delusion. I got to reimagine my days archiving a room of architect’s drawings in a joinery as being stuck in a lighthouse with a flatulent Willem Dafoe. I adored the dialogue and I could listen to Dafoe and Pattinson endlessly if Mr. Eggers ever did any radio play spin-offs. There are elements of Harold Pinter and Herman Melville amongst a host of other touchstones I probably missed, but it’s a film steeped in its own logic. Its saline black & white photography is also moody enough to probably tempt Béla Tarr out of retirement."