"Not much to add about Cassavetes, except that Criterion has put together an incredible box set, John Cassavetes: Five Films. There are alternate cuts, interviews, and documentaries, as well as the incredible films. Woman and Opening Night show Gena Rowlands at her best. These films contain performances that will never be matched, but are also structural innovations. I wish I could make movies like this."

"The Godfather. But you can’t say The Godfather I or II or III. You gotta take them all together, because, you know, they’re all of a piece. So, Godfather. Those are probably the most memorized dialogue of any film ever made. You could say any line from any of those three pictures — well, two and a half, anyway — and people would know what you’re referring to."

"The Godfather. But you can’t say The Godfather I or II or III. You gotta take them all together, because, you know, they’re all of a piece. So, Godfather. Those are probably the most memorized dialogue of any film ever made. You could say any line from any of those three pictures — well, two and a half, anyway — and people would know what you’re referring to."

"The Godfather. But you can’t say The Godfather I or II or III. You gotta take them all together, because, you know, they’re all of a piece. So, Godfather. Those are probably the most memorized dialogue of any film ever made. You could say any line from any of those three pictures — well, two and a half, anyway — and people would know what you’re referring to."

"Poetic and oh-so-funky, Orson Welles’s filmic essay on deception has balls of experimental steel. Cobbled together in his later years of European exile, it’s both a cheeky thesis on the nature of fakery and the best example I can imagine of filmmaking as giddy, childlike play. Now if someone would only do a decent DVD of The Trial, we’d be in business. (Nudge, nudge.)"

"I’m not being sarcastic: Xanadu is the foundation of my aesthetic. It’s a 1980 musical in which angsty painter Michael Beck meets muse Olivia Newton-John and an aging musician (Gene Kelly) from the Big Band Era. Naturally, they team up to open a roller-disco complete with tap dancing, leg warmers, and Zeus. All of it woven together – in perfect sincerity – by an ELO soundtrack."

"One woman's struggle to write a notebook that contains all the compartmentalized facets of her life -- her childhood, her politics and her lovers. Unlike the popular books of the 1960s, which featured 'mad housewives' jumping out of windows, what Lessing tried to do was to bring together a woman's brain and a woman's body, to show the delight in physicality. Womanhood is exuberant -- and wonderful."