"In my top three love stories. Narciso Yepes’s legendary score gives this juvenile romance its fame and contributes to its magic, but the movie is an entity of perfection. The artistic direction is meticulous and inspired; there’s a vanguard oneiric look to the film. Brigitte Fossey delivers an endearing and incredibly mature performance, and looks the epitome of femininity despite her—gulp—six years of age. Great opening sequence depicting the 1940s French exodus from Nazi occupation. Genuine and sensible study of youthful mores; creative representation of the children’s universe. Stunning grace and poetry. Heartbreaking departure scene. I love that film. It makes me want to be a pretentious critic."

"I love the fact that a West Coast pioneer took an East Coast approach to doing an album. Again, it's gangster to have a political opinion. He took that political incorrectness and made poetry out of it - to where again, it wasn’t 'Gangsta', it was 'Gangster'. I could appreciate that; I appreciate the business, not just random gunfire. There was a shock value to it. Gangsta rap now is just little kids talking shit; they’re going to get caught for their crime, they’re not being smart about their criminal activity. I like smart crime; white collar crime, but we’ve gone from the bosses making the music to the hit men."

"Most people remember David Lean for his big-scale epics, like Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, or The Bridge on the River Kwai. But here he is at his most precise and poetic. Both movies are epics of the spirit, and both are plagued by grand, utterly magical moments and settings; whether showing Oliver’s mother straining and in pain, by intercutting with a flexing branch of thorns, or by lovingly lingering on Miss Havisham’s decaying splendor, Lean understand the need for hyperbole in order to manage the larger-than-life Dickensian archetypes. Some of the passages in both films skate the fine line between poetry and horror."