"After getting my brain stretched by Kubrick, the next “favorite director” I started to discover as a preteen and teen was Nicolas Roeg. Like 2001 before it, The Man Who Fell to Earth was sci-fi that reached out and grabbed my mind, spun it around, and made me want to see it over and over again. Roeg’s use of music and surreal imagery made the film both a visceral and an intellectual experience simultaneously—a heartbreaking puzzle—still my favorite kind of film experience. Don’t Look Now is probably my favorite scary movie of all time, and a model for the now overused and underachieved expression “a smart genre film.” Now, that might mean a movie that’s marginally less dopey than most mainstream films that deal with the occult, but in the days of this and Rosemary’s Baby, etc., the emphasis was much more on smart than on genre. And Walkabout is an amazing piece of nearly wordless visual storytelling that left me desperately in love with Jenny Agutter for years afterward."

"After getting my brain stretched by Kubrick, the next “favorite director” I started to discover as a preteen and teen was Nicolas Roeg. Like 2001 before it, The Man Who Fell to Earth was sci-fi that reached out and grabbed my mind, spun it around, and made me want to see it over and over again. Roeg’s use of music and surreal imagery made the film both a visceral and an intellectual experience simultaneously—a heartbreaking puzzle—still my favorite kind of film experience. Don’t Look Now is probably my favorite scary movie of all time, and a model for the now overused and underachieved expression “a smart genre film.” Now, that might mean a movie that’s marginally less dopey than most mainstream films that deal with the occult, but in the days of this and Rosemary’s Baby, etc., the emphasis was much more on smart than on genre. And Walkabout is an amazing piece of nearly wordless visual storytelling that left me desperately in love with Jenny Agutter for years afterward."

"All right, Stanley Kubrick was a genius, the master of the big, ambitious film that stuns the senses, like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Paths of Glory is one of the last great triumphs of black-and-white filmmaking. It is also a tribute to the talent of Kirk Douglas, who here takes on the role of a French colonel in the trenches of the First World War with such explosive energy that one realizes how many films (and directors) were unworthy of Kirk’s genius as an actor—his first acting role, by the way, was onstage as the servant in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, with Catherine Cornell, Judith Anderson, and my mother as the sisters and Ruth Gordon as the dreadful sister-in-law. Nobody has ever captured the First World War better on film (except perhaps for Jean Renoir in Grand Illusion, which is in a class by itself). A heartbreaking giant of a film, not a bad shot or a wasted frame in it; perfect filmmaking."

"I saw the movie as a teenager and I loved it, but I didn’t know why I loved it. I loved it because it just felt like a gargantuan document about time and the history of time, but I didn’t really understand it. Then I saw it again probably in my mid-20s, and the part that I glommed on most to was – and this was pre-AI, basically pre-Siri; you could imagine me thinking about 2001 in the age of Siri. But then I watched it again probably two years ago, and it absolutely transformed itself, and I started to take different meaning from it. And I realized that, ultimately, what it was saying is that we are the aliens, and that curiosity, mankind’s curiosity, is what actually leads to our own demise in a deep, deep way. That we know something is a problem, yet we want to embrace it. I haven’t ever felt that way while watching a film. It’s such a perfect, beautiful document about the universe."

"After getting my brain stretched by Kubrick, the next “favorite director” I started to discover as a preteen and teen was Nicolas Roeg. Like 2001 before it, The Man Who Fell to Earth was sci-fi that reached out and grabbed my mind, spun it around, and made me want to see it over and over again. Roeg’s use of music and surreal imagery made the film both a visceral and an intellectual experience simultaneously—a heartbreaking puzzle—still my favorite kind of film experience. Don’t Look Now is probably my favorite scary movie of all time, and a model for the now overused and underachieved expression “a smart genre film.” Now, that might mean a movie that’s marginally less dopey than most mainstream films that deal with the occult, but in the days of this and Rosemary’s Baby, etc., the emphasis was much more on smart than on genre. And Walkabout is an amazing piece of nearly wordless visual storytelling that left me desperately in love with Jenny Agutter for years afterward."