"The easiest choice. The greatest of movies. Never has a film been so formally rich and so teeming with life. Jean Renoir’s romantic roundelay is as fluid and multifaceted as the characters he depicts with equal doses of compassion and bemusement, and this depiction of the mercurial nature of human behavior, of the beauty and absurdity of civilization, has never been equaled. The Dance of Death is the greatest sequence, but it’s also a dance of life. For many years, the film was literally unavailable in an acceptable print or video version in this country. For a showing several years ago (before the recent Janus Films rerelease), the Museum of the Moving Image had to import a 35 mm print from England. And as though it isn’t enough to be able to own a masterfully restored copy, the Criterion DVD has a great documentary about Renoir by Jacques Rivette!"

"David Cronenberg’s reflexive masterpiece of modern horror, with James Woods as a seedy purveyor of soft-core exploitation for cable TV, and Debbie Harry as his siren, brought the media-as-message theories of fellow Torontonian Marshall McLuhan to visceral life. This was one of the first movies I rented on VHS, and Videodrome is partly an exploration of the strange, clunky physical sensation attached to the idea of a feature film being available on a paperback-size plastic-and-tape cassette that is inserted into a machine . . . and our brains. A quarter century later, Cronenberg’s dazzling vision of a world where image and flesh are one—“long live the new flesh”—Videodrome’s futuristic vision is timelier than ever. And above all that, the movie is sexy, smart, funny, and fascinating, moving adeptly between its layers of reality, imagination, and that vast territory in between."

"The metaphor, man. The fact that they would take this age old, vilified idea of a powerful woman and take away that dark mystique that’s been repeated throughout history and in such a mean way to all women. Like, anytime you see in cartoons, in movies, anything from, like, the ’50s, the ’40s, you would see this dark bitter woman. And you would see her explored in a way where she always represented evil, but never with a sense of justified evil. Rewrote the history books on the vilification of a powerful woman. I thought that was really, really powerful for Disney to do that. It’s like taking an old metaphor that’s been repeated for so many years and putting it on its head. It makes you think twice when you look at a person that’s a “bad guy.” That‘s a powerful message for kids to not be judgmental."