"It’s difficult to watch The Great Dictator without thinking about how the world was about to be plunged into five years of war and horror, and it saturates everything with more wistful sadness than Chaplin probably could have imagined. It’s a comedy at the end of the world . . . this brief and desperate beam of optimism, laughing in the face of evil, just before everything went dark. These two Chaplin releases, as well as The Gold Rush and City Lights, are among the most amazing-looking Blu-rays I’ve seen. Could Criterion please do the same restoration work for Buster Keaton next?"

"[Number] four is Foxcatcher. And again the two performances for me were — well, I guess the three performances — but one is the director. First of all, it was just so visually beautiful. And I felt like it was visually beautiful for a purpose, not just like, “Look at this lovely shot, and now we’ll get back to storytelling.” I mean every shot moved the story forward in some way, and yet was beautiful, or horrific. I thought Mark Ruffalo was just amazing, and Steve Carrell. So I watched it two or three times. I just thought it was just brilliant."

"I could go with Shadow of a Doubt, any number of Woody Allen movies, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson — The Royal Tenenbaums I love — but I’m going to go with The Big Lebowski because it’s such a fully realized, beautiful film. John Goodman is amazing, [John] Turturro, [Steve] Buscemi, Sam Elliot — and then Jeff Bridges was fantastic. Julianne Moore. Just really, really, really, really such a satisfying film to watch, and so quotable, and something that I could have on a loop 24 hours a day in my home and never be bored with. Fantastic film. I’ll say no more."

"The story of a Zulu pastor and his son, set amid the horror of apartheid South Africa. It’s the tragic yet redemptive tale of human dignity, a beautifully woven story of that time. It was written in 1948, and I read it when I was at university in the early 1980s, when South Africa was the big moral story of the time. I longed to be a foreign correspondent and get out there. I also read, and wept through many performances of South African playwright Athol Fugard’s plays. But the images from this book stay with me, as does its amazing title."

"What’s amazing about All the President’s Men is that the only thing that happens in the whole movie is people make phone calls. There are no computers so they can’t look anything up — they’re looking up stuff in the Yellow Pages and they’re using, like, rotary phones. It’s Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford who are brilliant in it. They’re so natural. So, they’re making phone calls, they’re looking through files, and they’re having meetings in their newspaper’s editor’s office. That’s all that happens in the movie, and it’s as exciting as any big blockbuster movie. I mean, it’s really a huge accomplishment."