"The Lives of Others would go in there. It’s just an amazing movie. And then he went and did The Tourist, which, I think, got a 20 percent rating on your site. We look at your website quite a lot. But, [The Lives of Others] was just a beautiful film. So many great movies coming out of Germany, like… Well, The Reader was a Stephen Daldry film, but it was all about coming to terms with their past. And also, Downfall was as well. God, I could continue forever because I love movies."

"Having always felt deeply impatient and limited by having to express myself in perfect grammar and punctuation (this was pre-apostrophe gate!), I am quietly reveling in the profundity of Mailhot’s deliberate transgression in Heart Berries and its perfect results. I love her suspicion of words. I have always been terrified and in awe of the power of words – but Mailhot does not let them silence her in Heart Berries. She finds the purest way to say what she needs to say. She refines… How beautiful are these sentences?"

"This is one of my favorite films. The way that Louis Malle shoots Jeanne Moreau—those are some of the most beautiful walking scenes I’ve seen. She’s walking in the rain with her head held high, lost in herself, mumbling, and with that amazing score being played by Miles Davis. There is something so modern about the film, and it feels like it opens so many doors. When I was making A Fantastic Woman, I was trying to get a little bit closer to the elegant approach that Malle used to capture Moreau’s presence."

"The second one is that incredibly brilliant movie Betty Blue, which I love because it opens with that incredible lovemaking scene with Béatrice Dalle. There’s just something so vivid and luscious about it. It’s just so beautiful and sensual in every regard and I absolutely love the film. I saw it recently and it’s just as brilliant. And the incredible soundtrack, you know. It’s just as brilliant as when I first saw it. Withnail and I and Betty Blue were both in the same period; they were both seminal cinematic experiences for me."

"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!"

"Thank you, Criterion, for putting this amazingly creepy film out into the world in such a beautiful, definitive way. This is by far one of my favorite psychological horror films of all time. The Criterion version was an unbelievable step up from the VHS copy I had of this for years, when the film was strangely titled Corridors of Evil, for some reason. Carnival of Souls is like a fever-dream-elongated Twilight Zone episode. It’s a masterpiece, and I love falling asleep to the film as well. It induces great, strange dreams."

"My parents got divorced when I was about eight, and after that I moved with my mother from St. Louis to Boston. I became her movie pal, and she would take me to some very inappropriate movies! This was one of them. The Graduate has one of my favorite montages ever—that one where Dustin Hoffman jumps off a diving board and lands on Anne Bancroft’s chest! It’s sexy and beautiful, but it also captures how this young man spirals into a state of jadedness over the course of a summer."

"One of the scariest, most disturbing, and most beautifully shot films ever made, this was somewhat overlooked until recent years, and I’m glad it’s finally getting the reputation it deserves. It’s as much like actually experiencing someone’s nightmare as I can remember a film being. It blew me away when I first saw it on-screen (knowing nothing about it only added to its power), and I was so happy that Criterion gave us a beautiful transfer—which is the only way this film can really be appreciated."

"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."

"I’ve watched this film many times to unravel its mysteries and have never succeeded. That’s part of its power. Though willfully irrational, the story is emotionally grounded in the love affair between the two women. This film contains so many others in its DNA (Persona, Rosemary’s Baby, etc.) but never in an obvious way. I admire the freedom of Lynch’s script, which I imagine was the result of a TV pilot script (with multiple subplots and B characters) getting jammed into the straitjacket of a feature, producing this improbable, beautiful hybrid."