Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.

Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.

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.

'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.

I definitely have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for superhero movies because it's very clear that's the era we're in. It's like Christianity in the Middle Ages.

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

Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era.