"Although this movie portrays the very real and gritty life on a river barge, there is something so poetic in it. You’ll never forget the contrast between Père Jules (Michel Simon)—who can puff smoke from a cigarette out of the face tattooed around his belly button—and the romantic belief of Juliette (Dita Parlo) that you can see the image of your true love in water."

"It was like watching a documentary but it wasn’t. There’s a scene with Lar Lubovitch, who I ended up working with as a professional, where he’s choreographing a piece on Neve Campbell. It seemed they just let the cameras roll; it was so real. It was like being in the studio and watching them rehearse. It was a window into the life of a dancer."

"It amazes me how deftly Zola captures the idiosyncrasy, the mundanity, and the scale of life among all these different classes of people. Every character feels fully formed and real. And once I learned more about Zola’s involvement in the Dreyfus affair and how he advocated for individual freedom, I just thought, I love this man. He must have been an incredible person to know."

"An extraordinary memoir by an extraordinary woman. Each chapter is composed to the men (real and imagined) in her life who feel at once brilliantly mythical, and painfully earthbound. There are letters to former lovers, briefly encountered heroes, fictional paramours, and family members, and like with Lena Dunham’s book, I’ll shuffle through and reread to laugh and weep as if it were at first time."

"A shatteringly beautiful memoir about Hinton’s life on death row for 28 years for a crime he did not commit. It’s a real downer to read about something as dark and unfortunate as wrongful incarceration, but Mr. Hinton expresses himself with a heart incomprehensibly swollen with love and gives meaningful insight into his alienating experience. And he does so with a disarming sense of humor."