"It’s difficult to watch The Great Dictator without thinking about how the world was about to be plunged into five years of war and horror, and it saturates everything with more wistful sadness than Chaplin probably could have imagined. It’s a comedy at the end of the world . . . this brief and desperate beam of optimism, laughing in the face of evil, just before everything went dark. These two Chaplin releases, as well as The Gold Rush and City Lights, are among the most amazing-looking Blu-rays I’ve seen. Could Criterion please do the same restoration work for Buster Keaton next?"

"“I’m not typically interested in poetry, but I discovered The Flowers of Evil in high school as I was just becoming a goth and getting into Trent Reznor – and everyone else was getting into the Beat poets, who I find comparably boring if we’re going to discuss druggy, surrealist poetry. This work is so visceral, filthy and gorgeously written. It feels like a distillation of the opium scenes from Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, but more abstract and extensively documented. This one poem is just a disgusting, sexual description of a corpse that is permanently burned into my mind.”"

"For some reason. I think the combination of the gruff, tyrannical old man pursuing the unruly, rebellious son really appeals to me. The scenario is, in some odd way, almost as scary as Freddy Krueger, you know! The evil father is an idea that’s really fascinating to me. Hawks is great, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Big Sleep… He could do the Salt-of-the-Earth very well. He was a very smooth director; a very good film architect in terms of his storytelling. That’s how he constructed this film, and got so deep into the characters."