"[Akira] Kurosawa’s Rashomon. I mean, any Kurosawa blows my mind out my ass. We did a production of Rashomon that was actually a play. We did that at my college. We had this amazing sword teacher named Robin McFarquhar, and that was one of his big triumphs, was this production of Rashomon. It’s such a cool play, because you do it four times in a row, and you get everybody’s perspective. You know, one time the samurai is brave, one time he’s a coward. It’s really delicious for the actors."

"Oh, I got one, I got one, okay. Enough, the one with Jennifer Lopez? Ooh, that’s such a good movie. That’s the fighting one — she’s in an abusive relationship and basically escapes it, and he keeps going. She ends up killing him out of self-defense. I’m like “Genius, what a badass in this movie.” I love the suspense of that movie. It was such a good movie. And all the J Lo movies by the way — Maid in Manhattan, The Wedding Planner — those iconic rom-com movies are amazing."

"Need I say more? No matter what you or I may think about the film’s lead actor and director, this film has always inspired great emotion for me—love, passion, justice, freedom, unity. Epic fight scenes, great scope and cinematography and beautiful evocative score. It has a great mix of levity mixed in with the true gravity of the situation. There are also so many amazing performances from supporting characters and I most definitely had crushes on both Catherine McCormack and Sophie Marceau for several years after. Freedooommm!"

"Okay. I’m going to say a weird one here — but what an amazing performance in that film. When I was a kid I just loved these kind of movies that just took me to another world. I still like watching it today. I watch it with my kids. Gene Wilder. What a performance. It’s just extraordinary. It’s just a film that’s always stayed with me and I still love it today. It’s still fascinating to look at. Gene Wilder is just wild and kind of lonely and mad and so unhinged. It’s a fantastic film."

"When I was a teen, like for many of my generation, Monty Python were my comic heroes. But as brilliantly directed as the Python films are (look close at Monty Python and the Holy Grail—there are a lot of incredibly shot sequences), nothing prepared my for the amazing mix of humor, heart, and insane inventiveness that Terry Gilliam brought to his solo work. These two titles are films I bring up constantly in meetings in Hollywood—which usually leads to me being asked to leave. But I don’t care."

"When I was a teen, like for many of my generation, Monty Python were my comic heroes. But as brilliantly directed as the Python films are (look close at Monty Python and the Holy Grail—there are a lot of incredibly shot sequences), nothing prepared my for the amazing mix of humor, heart, and insane inventiveness that Terry Gilliam brought to his solo work. These two titles are films I bring up constantly in meetings in Hollywood—which usually leads to me being asked to leave. But I don’t care."

"I saw this just recently—proof that you can still make huge discoveries and feel like a young cinephile again at fifty. This amazing film can be filed under “cinema as a beautiful, frightening hallucination,” and it includes a rare collection of anamorphically shot images of action and movement. This is also one of those special films that are hard to assign easy descriptions. One year later, 2001: A Space Odyssey came out. Very different movies, but similar in how unusual and thrilling their ideas of cinema are."

"When I became a film academic in the 1980s, I was allocated a class through which I discovered silent (or rather non-sync-sound) films. I had never appreciated the extraordinary beauty of this cinema and, most of all, I loved films of the very late twenties, made on the cusp of the transition—for instance, Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld and The Docks of New York. People on Sunday is an amazing film document of Berlin just before the Nazis came to power, and is also a “young modern woman” film."

"I would say The Gold Rush. I mean, I pick this one, but I love all the body of work of Chaplin. He takes some very dramatic moments or situations and he finds hilarious elements in it. And then, the choreography of the scenes is just amazing all the time. And I think the way he thinks influenced me. Not saying that I am Charlie Chaplin, but I think it was so inspiring – I watched all his films when I was very young, and I think it shaped my vision of film."

"High and Low is my personal favorite Kurosawa movie. I love everything about it: the chamber piece of the first half, the sprawling police hunt that follows, the fact that Toshiro Mifune’s character is so committed to making high-quality women’s shoes. And there are so many great moments throughout: the pink smoke, the train sequence, the amazing ending scene. I find it so stunning and effective, and I love the way the film gets at themes of class and social inequality in the form of such an exciting procedural crime thriller."