"This is from a fantastic 1950s film that exposed Brazilian music to the outside world. It's the story of Orpheus set to Brazilian carnival, and it's very beautiful, melancholic, and full of these really captivating rhythms. I got into it first on tour doing OK Computer, a time where I felt very lost, personally and emotionally, which felt ridiculous when I was on the top of the world with my band. Inside, I needed to sort my shit out, and this album allowed me to cry. A few years later, my first son kicked for the first time when he heard his, and that's why we called him Salvador.
"

"This is just one of those movies that leaves you feeling queasy all over. Eating Raoul plays on all the stereotypical shock/schlock clichés typical of so-called B culture, which at the time (the early 1980s) was also being probed by Paul Bartel’s fellow Angelenos Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw (and perhaps further up the coast by the Kuchar brothers), who were also fascinated with and inspired by the prudish 1950s. Is there a moral here? Does there need to be? Why, exactly, is this film in the Criterion Collection? All questions better to put out of your mind when you pop it in."

"I was turned onto this by Rick Rubin. When we were writing White Pony I met with him to talk about him producing it, and he played me this record. I don't know why he played it for me, but I instantly fell in love with it. It's very soothing, super slow, a similar vibe to the Bohren or Sade, it's below mid-tempo, it's very slick, very warm. The lyrics are very simple but the vocals are right in your face, and under that the music really gets to breathe. The chord progressions sound really 1950s, those slow 50s picking patterns, the chord sequences are really simple, it's very honest, it's very pure."

"I revisited this recently after telling some friends to watch it. When you think of the time this was made, and you realize this is a story about a pregnant girl who decides to get her own place and make best friends with a gay man, it’s pretty astonishing. Everything about her life and the morality depicted in it is so 1950s, but she’s this outcast, and is not even very likable. But you’re completely on her side. Can you think of another female role like that? It’s a really complicated portrait of a young woman who doesn’t want to get married and just wants to live in her weird house with her friend."

"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."

"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."

"Is there a greater, more suggestive and bittersweet movie title than All That Heaven Allows? (Well, yes, there is, Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . , but that’s another story and another great Criterion disc.) Sirk dug beneath the surface of idyllic American small-town life in the 1950s, and the surface has never been more beautiful than in this Technicolor nightmare of conformity and the repressive nature of community and family life. It’s Freud vs. Walden, as pettiness, jealousy, and repression pair off against a bohemian vision of rural tranquility. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose brilliant essay on Sirk is included as an extra, remade the movie as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and it was also the model for Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven and Sanaa Hamri’s not-too-shabby Something New."

"We start this list off with Surprise Vacation as they seem to be a logical stepping stone out of that period of 1950s blues favourites, and there's a similar lo-fi quality. In terms of today's contemporary recording processes, how do you undo modern equipment, backwards? Well, you start by avoiding getting too complex. At the same time you avoid purposely creating noise for effect. However there is some appeal to be found in this lo-fi bottom line. 

Let's include Ramones in this – who would have thought that after 40 years there would be attention bestowed upon the punk scene? That scene erupted with the exact opposite: they didn't want attention. They abhorred that as a goal. And ironically this celebration four decades later is being reflected in window-dressing for highbrow stores for menswear and womenswear. We've almost seen it turn upside down – but that's okay."