In the Mac vs. PC ads, Apple bills itself as the antidote to Microsoft. To love Apple wasn't to sell out. It was to buy in. Most people use PCs, but Apple has the mindshare.

The enormous success of 2009's 'The Blind Side,' in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn't post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race - the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it.

Anything produced and then exhibited for public view is open to interpretation.

In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.

A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don't stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do.

Straight white males: that's the predominant moviegoing category, and the persistence of that is a dismaying maintenance of the status quo.

I don't see a lot of studio executives caring at all about what the culture is telling us. They think they make the culture. They're not out taking the temperature of things and using the results of whatever sort of cultural surveying they're doing to make movies. They're interested in doing things that people are already comfortable with, and taking those properties and filling them.