"My favorite among Antonioni’s trilogy of alienation (La notte and L’eclisse are the other two). For me, these films capture the slow and painful death of love with astonishing intuition and almost no dialogue. There is nothing to be said between lovers when they fall out of love, but the silent agony of their dying relationships is captured in heartbreaking glances and body language. A shoulder turn or look away speaks volumes. Antonioni is a master of blocking actors. They move up close, far away, and out of shot in long single takes that reveal more about their emotions than any confession."

"I just thought the tone and the feel of that movie — the way it sort of characterized small people in such small ways — it gave you so much information about them. It was so brilliantly done. As well as the struggle and the performance from the characters was incredible. Marion Cotillard, I thought, was robbed from an Academy Award. I thought she was just amazing in that. The story was so different and interesting. I just thought everything about it was really good. It just tapped into every single emotion that you had, went through the whole wheelhouse. I just loved it."

"Eastern Sounds is historically a very important record for me because it contained a riff, which I stole for what was to be my first hit single, ‘I Love My Dog’! I just couldn’t get that melody out of my mind! Eventually I wrote my song based on this record and thought nobody would find out. Later I owned up to it and paid Yusef his royalties for that song. Interestingly he also took his name from the Prophet Joseph/Yousef. We both embraced Islam, but he converted much earlier than I had, I didn’t think about religion at the time."

"We all know the deal: a group of people want to get together and do something simple—see a movie, drink some coffee, eat some dinner. But it never works out that way. That’s what Buñuel did here, but with greater stakes/steaks on the table. Levity and seriousness, the intrusion of the surreal into the upper crust, forcing a single question at the end: would anyone portrayed in the film actually watch the film? After all, each oneiric explosion in it is something the politesse class doesn’t speak of at the table: sex, death, religion."

"If the game is a film, then what are the rules? According to Renoir, who like Hoyle could load a deck with the best of ’em, you take a cast that presages Altman’s later operatic ensembles, you take an upstairs and downstairs at war through manner and subterfuge, you take a manor house with a camera that has an omniscient sweep—and you get one very fine film that can tell you more about social politics and film in a single two-hour period than Emily Post or a textbook can in a month or a lifetime."

"The lead singer for Deerhunter, Bradford Cox... I don’t like saying people are geniuses or whatever, but I just think that dude is so good at every single thing he does. He stays within his genre, but I think he does so well experimenting with stuff. He has two different bands. It’s just amazing how much he can expand over the one genre and make it radical. It’s a band I stumbled on and I was just pleasantly surprised by them. I really love all of Deerhunter’s stuff and they’re not afraid to get experimental which is really cool."

"The amazing thing about W. C. Fields’s comedy is how much mileage he can get out of almost no plot and very little dialogue. The humor comes from his gleeful disdain of American propriety, and from his impeccable sense of timing and absurdity. He can build a comic routine out of the pronunciation of “proboscis” and of such names as “Egbert Souse.” Fields’s movies have few frills, and the same is true of this straightforward single-disc version, but the performance and the movie are as bracing as a shot or two of late-morning whiskey."