We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds–not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. Francois Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theater, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience, turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: The audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.    –Roger Ebert

Ingmar Bergman, left, in 1963, and Michelangelo Antonioni about 1965. Both died Monday [July 30], Mr. Bergman at 89, Mr. Antonioni at 94 (New York Times, August 1, 2007).