"You know, what’s touched me I think is GoodFellas… It’s a very real movie. GoodFellas is really some deep stuff. It was very good. It was believable. It just felt like Queens. I don’t know if a lot of that movie was filmed in Queens, but it felt like something that was happening in my backyard that I didn’t really know about. So it’s almost like a history lesson. The acting is so good. I’ve said that a couple of times, but that’s my truth. When he came out with the gun and beats the kid up for messing with his sister, the kid was like, “You got something to say to m–,” and before he could say the word “me,” he was beat up. That’s the scene for me. It was very real to me that guys would do that for their family. People just want to be successful in life. They all want to be happy. And some people go about it in a way that’s pretty destructive, but in that scene, you could see how much he loved his family."

"Taken together, Edward Yang’s two masterpieces run nearly seven hours. I would give almost anything for more of either. Mathematically structured and teeming with ideas, characters, wisdom, and feeling, they move with astonishing humanity through every big thing: love, family, alienation, technology, cinema, politics, globalism, history, regret, obsession, murder, sex, time, adolescence, and so much more. Despite their novelistic hugeness, Yang’s genius feels approachable rather than impossible. (As opposed to Hou Hsiao-hsien, for example.) This quality also inspires the tantalizing thought that, hey, I could do that. No, no I can’t. I really encourage listening to the wonderful commentaries on both: Edward Yang and critic Tony Rayns for Yi Yi, and, in an act of epic insight, Rayns solo for A Brighter Summer Day."

"Taken together, Edward Yang’s two masterpieces run nearly seven hours. I would give almost anything for more of either. Mathematically structured and teeming with ideas, characters, wisdom, and feeling, they move with astonishing humanity through every big thing: love, family, alienation, technology, cinema, politics, globalism, history, regret, obsession, murder, sex, time, adolescence, and so much more. Despite their novelistic hugeness, Yang’s genius feels approachable rather than impossible. (As opposed to Hou Hsiao-hsien, for example.) This quality also inspires the tantalizing thought that, hey, I could do that. No, no I can’t. I really encourage listening to the wonderful commentaries on both: Edward Yang and critic Tony Rayns for Yi Yi, and, in an act of epic insight, Rayns solo for A Brighter Summer Day."

"Satrapi grew up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and its aftermath; Persepolis is the story of her childhood. Through Marji’s youthful (though not-always-innocent) eyes and mind, we see a turbulent moment in history unfold, and we witness the tremendous impact that local and global events and politics can have on even the most intimate moments of personal lives. We experience with Marji her day-to-day dreams and struggles, from family strife to wrestling with religious faith and custom. We’re swept up in her parents’ anxieties and her grandmother’s memories of an utterly different era. And we get a very real sense of what it was like to be a woman in Iran during this intense time of cultural and political transition."