The bravery of Stanley Kramer's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' amounted to two Hollywood legends - Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy - telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees.

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.

There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.

Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved.

Looney Tunes' was not a children's cartoon. I don't care what anybody says. It was very politically charged, very racial. And then they tried to soften it up for kids later. But it was for the adults.

I am from a woman's family. My great-grandmother had three daughters and a son. My grandmother had two daughters, and my mother had two daughters. My sister had a daughter and then finally a son. You should have seen my father with the son. He could not believe that finally there was a boy in the family.

As parents, we teach our children to do what's right.

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.