"Here’s a great double bill: watch this film with its haunting original score by Georges Auric, then again as a Philip Glass opera. (Thank you, Criterion, for including both tracks.) This Cocteau-Marais collaboration still intoxicates. Not since Sternberg had a director put his star (also his lover) on such luminous display."

"I worked hard at German so that I could read Brecht, but was saved by watching his plays performed live at Mannheim by an excellent company. However, it was Marc Blitzstein’s 1954 translation of Threepenny Opera in a tiny theater off-Broadway that electrified me with “Mack the Knife” and “Pimp’s Ballad.”"

"The whole [Godfather] series was brilliant. I loved all three of them. But my favorite was number two. I thought it was extraordinarily shot. I think the way Francis Coppola puts these incredible stories together where he has the juxtaposition of having people be killed while this incredible symphonic music is playing and some opera is taking place — it’s all an opera. I think the whole Godfather series is like one magnificent opera. I just think it’s one of the great movies of the century — since film making. I think he is a genius. I think he just captured the passion and the anger and the ignorance of the whole world of the Mafia, and what that meant — the Black Hand. He glamorized them in a way that made us want to know them, be there, experience it — even though it speaks of great danger. But there was something so enticing about their world, that whole world. And the people were such rich studies of character. Robert De Niro was the greatest he’d ever been, and of course, Pacino. Those performances – every single performance was genius. I loved the films. I even like the third one."

"How is this not the hugest show? It’s the improbable combination of Barry Lyndon and The Shield. With its jaw-dropping act breaks and rug-pulling twists, this violent soap opera as social commentary on sex work boasts two acting legends (Samantha Morton and Lesley Manville) going toe-to-toe on a weekly basis."