If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

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.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

One of the gifts one movie lover can give another is the title of a wonderful film they have not yet discovered

Dr. Leonard Shlain, chairman of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center, said they took some four and five year-olds and gave them video games and asked them to figure out how to play them without instructions. Then they watched their brain activity with real-time monitors. At first, when they were figuring out the games, he said, the whole brain lit up. But by the time they knew how to play the games, the brain went dark, except for one little point.

Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.

We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.