"The most beautiful film ever made, and the one that taught me that sci-fi doesn’t need spaceships and robots. Some of the crew attributed the deaths of Tarkovsky and quite a few others involved with the film to its brutally toxic locations, but visually the result is as good as cinema can get. Eduard Artemyev’s score merges so well with the sound design that I would happily listen to all three hours of the audio on repeat. —WY"

"It’s ‘The White Hotel’ by DM Thomas because I’ve only read to about page forty-seven. I couldn’t get past the poem section, which is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. As one solid book of poetry and evocative writing, it’s the best. I thought I was in that poem; kind of similar to the way Leonard Cohen makes me feel like I’m in his songs. I’ve recommended it to anyone who I thought could read."

"I saw this film when it first came out in the very early ’60s. It’s a chronicle of a decadent society full of Fellini’s incredibly inventive and imaginative imagery. It’s the story of a Roman journalist struggling between producing something meaningful in his life and drifting along a path of total emptiness. I was very young when I saw the film. I was completely inspired by the combination of such beautiful photography and the sad and powerful story."

"It’s so lovingly conceived, every frame packed chock-full of beauty. Bill Murray is hilarious and tragic. Jason Schwartzman is a revelation. But the moment Miss Cross tells off Max Fischer, asking him what he thinks he’s specifically going to do with her if they get together, is one of the more chilling scenes put on film. After establishing a beautiful, borderline precious world where a precocious kid rules a storybook school, shit suddenly becomes real."

"Directed by the Portugese master Manoel de Oliveira. Mr. de Oliveira made his first film, a silent one in 1929, and is probably shooting something [now]. A very idiosyncratic and unique filmmaker with a very singular sense of storytelling and pace. This is his adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It has probably my favorite last line in cinema – along with “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” – which is, “No one is so good as I, in pretending life is beautiful.”"

"I am mainly obsessed with the 1920s and 1930s. A lot of this record is inspired by the art, music, and film of that time, like Aelita, which is this 1920s sci-fi Russian film about a woman who lives in space. Their version of sci-fi in that time period was so elegant, beautiful, and minimal because they didn't have the same kind of imagination yet. It didn't become sci-fi in the way we see it now. "