"A great statement on human nature made by one of my favorite directors, Sidney Lumet. Early Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Martin Balsam are brilliant here, as well as the messenger/angel Henry Fonda. If you have any doubts about jury duty, please watch this. As for justice, there is just us . . ."

"It’s a great meditation on how we treat and mistreat ‘the other.’ A magical, thought provoking film that I saw at a time in my life when I was questioning a lot of things about the nature of humanity and how we react when we come up against the unknown and unknowable."

"In Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, a great writer is as endangered by his repressed passions as he is by the cholera plague. I was a young fiction writer who wanted to be an artist at what I did. Why wouldn't I be interested, as Mann was, in the nature of the artist?"

"No, not vampires; the late William Gay unfortunately didn't anticipate the world takeover of Bella and Edward when he named his backwoods Tennessee gothic novel, but it is no less a stunning web of Cormac McCarthy-esque necrophilia, murder, spot-on rural dialogue, and haunting renditions of nature. He is my new favorite writer."