"This is the first film I purchased on DVD, and it’s the film I recommend most often. Though I consider Todd Haynes a feminist filmmaker, he has a tendency to leave his female protagonists much worse off than they were before as the end credits roll. His character arcs are vicious downward spirals, and they’re utterly compelling. When I teach this film in my class at the University of Illinois, I pair it with “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that is also about a wife and mother slowly unraveling under the pressure of her own femininity. At the end of a hard day, I often find comfort knowing that at least I am not Carol White."

"Kubrick was a fearsome intellect. His approach to filmmaking and storytelling remains as mysterious at it is compelling. The illusion of control over the medium is total. Both films speak eloquently about the scale of a man against the tide of history, and both raise the bar for every “historical” film to follow. Paths of Glory is a searing indictment of the war machine, as pertinent now as it was in its day. I suspect, however, that Kubrick was also a highly instinctive director, and that he grasped incessantly for his films. An anecdote tells us of him begging Kirk Douglas to stay in bed a few more days after an accident, because Kubrick was using the “downtime” to understand the film they were making."