"Once, visiting friends in San Francisco, a bookcase came loose from the wall and fell on me. Three people came running in from another room when they heard the crash and saw me sprawled on the floor beneath a mountain of books. Did they say, “Are you all right?” No. In unison, they all said, “Howards End!” That memory, and a recent PBS re-doing (even better than the excellent Merchant Ivory film) of Forster’s novel, have renewed my passion for this book. Its searing depiction of class differences, the wit of its dialogue, and the description of that vine-covered house—no wonder they fought over it!—go together to make this one of my favorites."

"For most other filmmakers, making a movie as good as Mysterious Object at Noon would be a crowning achievement. Because it’s Apichatpong, the film is usually considered relatively minor, a promising start. That’s nuts. A portrait of the collective imagination of Thailand, the movie doesn’t just anticipate many of his long-term themes––memory, the boundaries between real and unreal, dislocation––it explores them deeply, intricately, and with a radical appetite for play and invention. Neither documentary nor fiction, and existing somewhere between the total control of his later features and the experimental spryness of his short films and gallery work, it’s a unique masterpiece by the best filmmaker in contemporary cinema."