"This novel will shatter those who are ready for it, ready for Dostoevsky’s courage to plunge into the abyss of human cruelty, and his wisdom at locating what grace there is. This is a novel of ultimate destruction and grace. It has in it the whole lived world, also heaven, also hell."

"In Bruges is another one like that. It’s just flawless, like, it’s so tight. The ending is perfect. Just when you’re like, “Oh, they’re gonna bring in this Ralph Fiennes character and he’s just not gonna be able to compete with the main cast,” and he just crushes it and is doing something completely different. Oh, he’s just heaven."

"Is there a greater, more suggestive and bittersweet movie title than All That Heaven Allows? (Well, yes, there is, Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . , but that’s another story and another great Criterion disc.) Sirk dug beneath the surface of idyllic American small-town life in the 1950s, and the surface has never been more beautiful than in this Technicolor nightmare of conformity and the repressive nature of community and family life. It’s Freud vs. Walden, as pettiness, jealousy, and repression pair off against a bohemian vision of rural tranquility. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose brilliant essay on Sirk is included as an extra, remade the movie as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and it was also the model for Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven and Sanaa Hamri’s not-too-shabby Something New."

"Every man I’ve ever gotten close to has loved this movie to the point where I am less interested in a guy’s astrological sign than the degree of his obsession with Days of Heaven. So I was a little resistant to the whole Malick canon. Which is nonsense because this is the greatest film of a great director. It’s so stunning and genuinely suspenseful, which is a rare combination. It’s a classic but not in the way that some classics can feel like taking your medicine. Like Do the Right Thing, no one needs me to be the one to introduce them to Days of Heaven. So maybe I’ll just describe the order of images that pop into our collective heads when we think of this film: Wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, Sam Shepard, wheat, wheat . . ."