'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

Nobody looks perfect. We have to find peace with the way we look and get on with life.

There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.

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.

We exist to have our wealth moved up the economic chain out of our reach.

Some of these people make my skin crawl.