"McEwan’s razor-sharp descriptions of human emotion always hit me hard, and I find this to be the most haunting and heartbreaking of his books. A father looks up in the grocery store and realizes his four-year-old missing; the search for her destroys his marriage and his life. I’m a huge fan of McEwan’s—my first feature was based on his short story “First Love, Last Rites,”—but this is the one that stays with me."

"Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. [This movie] came out the same year as Pretty Woman, but this was a film that worked on so many levels — it wonderfully incorporated humor and the supernatural, and was a love story in which, even though the lead character dies, he just can’t leave the woman that he loves. And they put in the mystery, too. It’s such a unique package, I don’t think that it’s ever been done before."

"I love films that are great not only in themselves but in the idea of them that stays in memory. But this then can dwarf the actual film, which perhaps it has in the case of Black Orpheus—some aspects now try one’s patience slightly. A few years back a Brazilian film was touted as the realistic and gritty version of the story, by those who knew the actual milieu—another black eye for realism and grit."