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.

Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.

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.

The problem with a lot of movies when it comes to race is that they want to be moral, and they want to make the audience feel good about something that a lot of people don't feel good about.

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.

I have a pretty good sense of when to express misgivings. And white critics are just as capable of pointing those things out and noticing them as people of color.

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.