"Whoa! From the very beginning, it is the original soap opera, and I loved every second of the drama! To watch a writer like Dickens yet again (I had already read “Great Expectations,”) weave so many characters’ storylines together with one another… This book required you to pay attention to every character and every word and served to remind this: no person or thing is insignificant."

"I was crying reading the secret letter exchange Kruschev and John Kennedy quite extensively. Together, they thought they could create World Peace. They almost did, just before Kennedy was assassinated. If you want to read all the correspondence between those two, there is a separate 200 page book of it. This book only mentions a few. But it gives the picture of John Kennedy we didn’t know"

"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."

"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.)"