"I saw Rust And Bone. It’s about a woman who is a whale trainer, and she loves to go dancing: she loves to go to the club. And the other main character is really into boxing, and he has a son that he doesn’t take care of, but then he has to. It’s hard to feel empathy for either character in the beginning. There are some really intense plot twists. She eventually loses her legs. They become good friends. I won’t say anymore, but it was amazing."

"It's one of those pictures that puts the lie to that idea that the sequel is never better than the original. Again, you have a filmmaker in James Whale who has now been given more resources to explore the same themes and issues as he did in the first film but he brings along with it an attitude towards the material and a result he doesn?t so much kid it as parody it. It?s a beautiful film to look at, extremely well acted, very witty."

"To go back to the ’30s, which is the movies I saw when I was growing up on television — it was one that they never showed, because it was lost for years and it was by James Whale. It’s called The Old Dark House, 1932. It’s currently about to be reissued on Blu-ray. For years, all you could see were these sort of beat-up prints I think they found in the mid-’60s, and they had been lost, because of a remake and some rights issues and stuff. Now, it’s sort of come back, and it’s got a great cast of Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey. It’s the classic “travelers stranded in the haunted house and the bridge has washed out”, but it’s the template for all the movies that followed it. It’s still one of the more watchable and disturbing movies from that period. And it’s a shame that it isn’t better known; it never got television distribution, and it wasn’t included in the package of Universal horror pictures because it wasn’t in their library anymore. It’s a chance, I think, for people to catch up with it now. I’m a big James Whale fan, and this might be his best picture."

"When Wes Anderson asked me to provide incidental narration to his film about the Tenenbaum tribe, I honestly could not make out what the film was about. It turned out to be a Wes Anderson film, which, in my mind, is the New Yorker magazine’s cartoon staff meets Jules Feiffer meets Preston Sturges. Or, perhaps, none of that. The Royal Tenenbaums, at the time of its release, was arguably one of the most original movies, in tone and style, since Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. The cast is pitch-perfect, and the film features Gene Hackman’s greatest work. (I know. That’s saying a lot. But it’s true.) Anderson and Owen Wilson were nominated for best original screenplay at the Oscars in 2002. With cinematography by the remarkable Robert Yeoman (Drugstore Cowboy, The Squid and the Whale)."