"My favorite genre: movies that are for children that are not for children at all. (And when Mike Patton, with Fantômas, covered one of its songs on the band’s 2001 album, The Director’s Cut, an even darker veil was pulled over the film.) This film sends me back to summer nights down South, running through the woods long after the dinner bell rang. I’d freeze on the line between our glowing yellow porch light in front and the deeper woods behind. The compact blackness of those deeper woods terrified me, but it hypnotized me more. The Night of the Hunter’s river sequence and the title sequence of To Kill a Mockingbird are the truest portrayals of childhood that have ever been captured on film."

"I was not prepared for the journey this compelling novel took me on. Or so I thought. I knew nothing of the lives of Puerto Rican immigrants to the United States, and certainly very little of the lives of the children. This book changed that. It is a book of such power that it is as if a completely new layer of the American experience has been exposed to our view. And like many a great work of fiction, not one line is wasted and every single word rings true."