"A rare animated film that has the agility to balance melancholy, terror, beauty, and heart with grace. Has more to say about the human condition using hand-drawn rabbits than most live-action films do with flesh-and-blood homo sapiens. They used to show this around Easter on CBS—I love that. The dreamy impressionistic backdrops. The wonderfully gratifying finale. The song “Bright Eyes” gets me every time. "

"It’s a film I’ve watched so many times, and every time I watch it I find something new in it. Again, it’s got kind of a strange beauty about it: it’s disturbing and kind of magical, and mythical and mysterious, and just shot amazingly. And there’s kind of a madness in it, which I really like as well. The original version, because that’s the one I know the best."

"When you are put down by the larger society and there’s a poet who compares the color of your skin to chocolate and brown sugar, you fall for it, because you need it. Paul Laurence Dunbar — who was one of the great poets of the 19th and 20th centuries — wrote about African-Americans, and he showed me the beauty of our colors and the wonder of our music."

"Written by my other favorite Irish writer, this book couldn’t be more different in tone than “The Butcher Boy,” but is no less captivating. In this beautifully mediative tale, Alexander Cleave is a celebrated actor who returns to live in his childhood home. The book seemingly has little or no plot but the sheer towering beauty of its language, atmosphere and insight make it impossible to put down or to forget."

"When, in the 1970s, I began to search for films made by women that would reflect feminist engagement with cinema at the time, Jeanne Dielman appeared as the perfect answer to a feminist cinephile’s dream. Akerman conjured up a world and a rhythm of life that had never appeared on the screen before, and did so with an extraordinary and radical beauty, political intelligence and mastery of both storytelling and filmmaking."

". . . Speaking of the human soul! This is a film of profound beauty made by a master of cinema, who could go from action-packed samurai epics to this tear-jerking gut-wrencher. This, The Apu Trilogy, and pretty much all of Ozu’s output (man, ten is just too small an amount to list here!) are micro-stories that focus on giant human themes, and I’m so glad they exist!"