"A visual and aural feast. The best movie ever made about moviemaking. Greece and Brigitte Bardot provide the purest form of seduction; Jack Palance provides the sleaziest. The subtext that explains the title is sexual politics at its most provocative. Every frame of this movie is invigorating. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard and composer Georges Delerue deserve to be canonized. The already anointed Fritz Lang, playing himself, gives the film yet another pleasurable dimension of film truth."

"I’m choosing Breillat’s film because it pulls me in and disturbs me. I’ll never forget that long push-and-pull seduction scene in the bedroom, which Breillat re-created in 2002’s Sex Is Comedy, or the sense of mounting menace that finally explodes. I don’t know how she does it, but she coaxes her actors into very private, intimate places. I imagine the process is born of deep trust, but it’s tough. As a director, it’s difficult to push people that far. Take this as a stand-in for many other films directed by women that, for whatever reason, aren’t in this collection: Claire Denis’s Beau travail being the obvious one that comes to mind, though there are many others."