"For any musician – not so much vocalists, but anyone who played guitar – when this came out it changed everything. I went to see them at the Rainbow in London, because I missed them supporting Black Sabbath. We were making our first album in London at the time and they were unbelievable: it was a West Coast rock & roll party and a new era in guitar playing. I had never seen anything like it before. Then all the glam metal bands copied Van Halen, because they were the first of the hair metal bands, selling sex. That’s really how they looked. ‘Running WIth The Devil’ is a fucking fantastic rock song – not quite as good as ‘Smoke On The Water’, but not far off."

"You really can’t beat The Apartment for finding laughs and heartache and triumph in the life of a morally compromised schnook of an insurance salesman. The great Billy Wilder was at one of his many career peaks here, finding unforgettable depth in Shirley MacLaine as elevator operator Fran Kubelik, and pulling a delicious Mitt Romneyesque-bad-guy performance out of an unlikely casting choice, the Disney leading man from Flubber, Fred MacMurray. The high-water mark in romantic comedy, this movie is so assured of its tone that even an attempted suicide is never far from a big laugh. It’s all wrapped up in giddy melancholy and — in a rare move — the Academy gave this comedy a whole bunch of Oscars too. Viva Wilder!"

"As an anticolonialism fable it’s extremely on the nose, but whatever. Guys, just . . . Colonialism: Don’t Do It. What is totally unforgettable about this film is the photography: constant fogs, blooming white surfaces, and inky jungle shadows. There’s a shot of the hero and the Panther Woman reflected in a pool of rippling water, then her real foot dips into the frame—it makes me gasp. There’s Bela Lugosi’s imperious, rabbinical presence as the Sayer of the Law. And most importantly, there’s Charles Laughton, obviously delighting in the role, giving the British scientist/eugenicist a sadistic perviness that I’m sure wasn’t in the script. In one moment, in the midst of threatening the hero, he just sprawls his whole body across a table, like a happy fat cat."