Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.

Time is what the depressed and panicked lack.

Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights.

No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.

In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.

I am, beneath everything else, a fan. I was fixed in this mode as a young boy and am awed by people who take the risks of performance.

Movies are not about moving, but about whether to move.