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“... Hancock’s life zooms in on his alcoholism and depression. David Bellos does not, in the case of Jacques Tati, have a ruthless control freak or incurable melancholic on his hands, although even his book contains one or two tales of debts unpaid, employees exploited and lapses into despair. (A very small price to pay for getting to write and direct six ...”

“... film directors’ instead – Renoir, Gance, Eisenstein, Ray, Truffaut, Keaton, Vigo, Tati. Tati has lately died after a career triumphant beyond compare in comic quality, apart perhaps from Keaton. Both could have made films in broom cupboards. Keaton used his august and stoic profile as a sort of ...”

“... in Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967) and Traffic (1971). You can see all of these, and more of Jacques Tati’s work, in a magnificent new Criterion set; and a new print of Playtime is showing at the BFI as part of a Tati retrospective. They wear well, these films. Or rather, they don’t wear, they grow. Everyone ...”

“... worldwide into the ebb and flow of the Little Man’s campaign against oppression and neglect. Jacques Tati as Monsieur Hulot in ‘Les Vacances de M. Hulot’ (1953). In the decades after the Second World War, another supremely accomplished mime artist with a lively sense of the possibilities of film emerged as a plausible successor to the ...”

“... the loudest of any director one can think of.’ Anyone for critical terrorism? And admirers of Jacques Tati will treasure another of Roud’s throwaway lines: ‘I wish I could fully share Fieschi’s views on Tati, but the disagreeable and to me totally unfunny Hulot seems to get in the way.’ Asides like these ...”

“... More than that, however, it appropriately points up a line of affinity between Chaudhuri and Jacques Tati, two humane and diffident humourists who also happen to be rigorous seekers after perfection in their own work, and whose fundamentally stern moralism has less to do with authorial finger-wagging than with the unanswerable exactness with which ...”

“... have a lilt and grace of their own. It’s all a matter of makeshift improvisation: you feel that Jacques Tati could have taken the scene described here and turned it into a small film, charming, but disturbingly poignant. There are grounds for regarding ‘Manners’ as a covert manifesto poem – the paradox seems allowable in Bishop’s case – with ...”

“... let alone such important directors of Russian descent as Pitoeff, Komisarjevsky, Peter Brook and Jacques Tati, all of which is surely relevant to the modern reader’s view of the subject. He also virtually omits the cabaret and the ‘Blue Blouse’ agitprop movement, though he gives a useful account of the latter’s successor, the TRAM youth theatres ...”

“... new territory by mixing it with a range of cinematic, theatrical and televisual influences from Jacques Tati, through the Cabaret Voltaire, to Tom and Jerry. The jokes are new, the comic situations are different, but there is something in the relationship – the odd pairing of minds adrift in their own skewed universe – that immediately suggests ...”

“... repetition and pale historical reimaginings that make up most of the novel. Someone once said of Jacques Tati’s Playtime that it could be forgiven because Tati had earned himself the right to doodle on a grand scale. The same is true of Gray. In his intelligent and warm-hearted biography, Glass records the moment ...”