"My wife accuses me of being a "declinist" because I get so starry-eyed over everyone's early work. I love everything Chantal did but I confess I probably love this the most."

"I remember going to my first “gay” film festival in the ’70s, with its tiny newsprint program, folding chairs for the audience, a complete underground experience. I asked my companion, “When do we see a lesbian movie?” Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde jewel was my first. My God, talk about ahead of her time. A proto-punk dyke protagonist, a butch, a whore, an outlaw, the unrepentant seize-fiend of all she sees . . . We still fight for glimpses of such antiheroines in the movies. Julie/Chantal is, regretfully, still a woman on the edge of antipatriarchal time."

"In this masterpiece from our dearly departed Chantal Akerman, there is so much pathos in the pacing alone. The deep tensions in the film, which concern sex and violence and domesticity and motherhood, unfold with a sense of unrelenting inertia. Jeanne Dielman epitomizes my favorite kind of person in film and in real life—the unruly woman."