"Is Setsuko Hara the most beautiful actress in movie history? That’s just a rhetorical question . . . the answer, of course, is yes. In Late Spring, she plays the young daughter of a widowed father who reluctantly wants to see her married. I am the man she should have married, but that’s a different story. Like many cinephiles, I was first drawn to Ozu by his serene compositions, the meditative “pillow shots” of train stations and empty rooms that served as scene transitions, and the exquisite way that his films explore the architecture of domestic and urban life. Repeated viewings reveal that underneath the director’s formal, often eccentric playfulness, there lies a fascinating undercurrent of sexual neurosis and pathology that is thinly masked by the demure self-sacrifice of the characters. In their own quiet way, Ozu’s families are deeply fascinating. And this two-disc set has an amazing bonus: Tokyo-ga, Wim Wenders’s loving and thoughtful feature-length tribute to Ozu, the actor Chishu Ryu, and Tokyo. It’s a first-person documentary and urban portrait par excellence, photographed by Ed Lachman."

"I love Wes Anderson, and I can only compare his movies to other movies he’s made, because you can’t really compare them to other directors’ films. Obviously, Wes lives in a world that’s like his childhood, and he draws from a delicate, nerdy kind of etiquette-obsessed fairy-tale world in many different ways. There’s an elegance about what he does and an absurdity that’s almost otherworldly. His sensibility lies somewhere between the late ’50s and the late ’60s, with modern elements in there, but really it feels like an old storybook. So Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m sure, is something he was dreaming of and you can really feel that. The casting was awesome—I love George Clooney, and I thought he was perfect for it. The pacing of Wes’s dialogue is perfect for animation—snappy, zippy, cartoonish, cute, but with an adult wink. It was incredibly well shot and the music was incredible. I just had a really good time. It was a very, very enjoyable film for any human being."