"The first Tarkovsky I saw was Nostalgia, and I kept asking myself, how can someone have done this? Where does this mind come from? Later, I saw Andrei Rublev for the first time at Anthology. What I love about it is that it just hits you in places you don’t expect—the composition of the shots and how he fills them with emotion is so beautiful."

"Probably the most beautiful overall film/package combo in the Criterion Collection. Mizoguchi’s eerie, haunting, and elegant film is one of the most devastating morality plays I’ve ever seen, and it just might scare you into being a better person. It will most likely haunt you for quite a while. The design of the packaging is also really gorgeous. Most likely my favorite Criterion disc set."

"Another one with a massive text resting on that second disc. How delightful it was to marvel in the splendor of this film and then watch the Godard–Fritz Lang special feature! Also, a truly beautiful cover of which I was always quite fond. This spot could just as easily be Masculin féminin, my favorite Godard for years. Criterion’s support of sixties Godard has always been remarkable."

"Munro is a touchstone for me, and she’s been my favorite writer for more than 25 years. This is the first book I read by her, when I was a junior in high school. Right away, I found in her work something that was recognizable to me—and, at the same time, I found some fictional alchemy that even now remains beautiful and inspiringly elusive."

"It’s a really amazing orchestral arrangement, which I think is actually an improvement on the original recording. It’s a total reimagining and it’s got a really beautiful clarinet part in it and takes what is a simple rock’n’roll song and turns it into something really special. It sounds like it’s from the soundtrack to The Wind In The Willows or something, just really forest-y and dreamy."

"I can’t help but include this book on any list I’d ever make of books I love. It is bewitching, playful, poetic, and really beautiful. Ingrid Caven looks like Marlene Dietrich and sings like Lotte Lenya. She was Fassbinder’s muse on film and Schuhl’s in life, and the book creates a fictive plane of reality in between all four, plus postwar German history, plus the 1970s."

"How could so profoundly sensitive a writer of beautiful English have been such an apparently shallow, even unpleasant, man? Whatever the answer, I re-read Waugh’s books again and again, mesmerized by the chiseled craftsmanship of every sentence. I could have chosen any of his books, but the Sword of Honor trilogy, an affectionately comic portrayal of the bungling chaos of military life, is perhaps my favorite."

"I genuinely grieved for Anna for days after I finished reading it. That’s what reading Tolstoy is like…the best and purest realism. I also love that a man wrote a story that so perfectly portrays the misogyny that this woman was subjected to: punished for loving another man, torn apart from her son, isolated and addicted to drugs and suffering postpartum depression. Super sad and beautiful."

"I was so excited by the news of this incredible release and restoration. Every moment is beautiful—as, of course, is the soundtrack by Ravi Shankar. Some scenes even seem to be able to penetrate the boundary of your own personal memory. Electrifying but peaceful. Throughout the entire trilogy, everything is leaving Apu behind, but the final scene shows all currents flooding home to him."

"I was so excited by the news of this incredible release and restoration. Every moment is beautiful—as, of course, is the soundtrack by Ravi Shankar. Some scenes even seem to be able to penetrate the boundary of your own personal memory. Electrifying but peaceful. Throughout the entire trilogy, everything is leaving Apu behind, but the final scene shows all currents flooding home to him."