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.

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

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

All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don't feel an obligation to do that because I'm black.

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.

Polisse' is the sort of cop thriller where people do things like angrily bang on a desktop or sweep everything off it. If it happens once, it must happen six times. But every time it did, I wanted to stand up and cheer, which I've never wanted to do for any such thriller.

'Brokeback Mountain' is a sad love story about two people who can't be together, and the reason that they can't be together is because being gay is a stigmatized thing. It would be interesting to have the same movie in which the two guys weren't in the closet and there was no shame about them being gay and they couldn't be together for other reasons. I still feel like we're a long way from that happening.