When we're discussing who to invite to a dinner party, my wife Chaz and I sometimes use the shorthand, 'good value for money,' which indicates guests expected to be entertaining.

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.

It is not enough for a movie to be righteous. It must also be watchable.

In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were. Such games were weapons against the ennui of endless Saturdays.

CROUCHING TIGER is nevertheless a gloriously big epic, starring the Hong Kong action stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in a visionary adventure where the characters seem set free from the force of gravity.

Yes, I was fat, but I dealt with it by simply never thinking about it. It is useful, when you are fat, to have a lot of other things to think about.

Marlon Brando is the most influential movie actor of the century.