"Films about the nature of performance, our collective need to watch and be artists, and the heavy cost of leading a public life. Altman’s opus is freewheeling in tone yet dense as a glittering jewel, leading to a conclusion as bleak as any American film I can think of. Bob Fosse’s penultimate film takes the fundamentals of editing and reinvents them afresh, while concluding that there are certainly worse things than death."

"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."