"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."

"I watched “The Farewell” nearly too late to include it on this list, but thankfully was able to write in and add it at the last minute. I adored this film, not least for its beautiful simplicity. The camera work was gorgeous but never drew attention to itself, the writing was subtle yet smart and emotional, the acting honest and on point. I’ve read quite a few articles about this film and the challenges of getting it made and I’m so grateful it happened without compromises. More like this!!"

"I recently made a documentary about going to Moscow to try to help turn Everybody Loves Raymond into a Russian sitcom. And I had some problems. But this, this was nuts. It’s the ultimate nightmare and the wildest making-of movie. One of the all-time great metaphors for art, or life, dragging a steamship up and over a mountain was Fitzcarraldo’s burden. And so it was of the filmmaker, the great and possibly crazy Werner Herzog. Among the beautiful insights here are his rants against nature. That’s what keeps me inside watching movies."

"I would have picked Crooklyn but you guys haven’t put it out (yet), which I really do believe is one of Spike Lee’s most undervalued films. But Do the Right Thing had a similar influence on me growing up. It’s Brooklyn, it’s beautiful, it’s got a cast that is absolutely flawless—too many great performances to mention—and it was revolutionary and in-your-face. The cinematography by Ernest Dickerson is stunning and iconic. I felt so alive the first time I saw this film in high school and have in every subsequent viewing."

"Although any one of the recent godsend rush of Kurosawa releases could go in this slot. For years now this gem (and much of his filmography) has only been available for us poor Region 1 sods on crappy import discs, and though the broken English subtitles via a bad Chinese translation had a sometimes poetic dadaistic flair, it’s a relief to finally have a beautiful, intelligible disc of it. The film itself stands easily up to Stray Dog and High and Low as one of Kurosawa’s best contemporary crime dramas."

"Once Around is a beautiful movie. And it was funny, and it was moving, and it was great. The story itself, which is a true story, is such a remarkable — simple, but not simple — story about a woman who falls in love with a guy who is kind of socially unacceptable. He’s loud, and her family just thinks he’s chalk on a blackboard. It’s how they come to love him. Holly Hunter is fantastic. It’s actually quite a brilliant movie, and I’ve always been extremely proud of it."

"Porter accomplishes an extraordinary amount in a few pages. She addresses the horrors of war from a woman’s perspective; she touches on the difficult a terrain a working woman must navigate in a man’s world; she creates a desirable male, describing his physical allure from a female point of view: quite rare in most fiction. But most astonishing, in chronicling Miranda’s near death experience and her reluctant return to life, she describes the indescribable and deals with the most profound human issues: life, death, identity, in shatteringly beautiful prose."

"I just love this book. When I was halfway through it—right around when one of the three daughters tries to talk to her father and he goes out into a storm—I was like, “Oh my God, this is King Lear.” I was so impressed with how Smiley was able to take such a classic tale and put it in rural 20th-century Iowa. It’s beautiful, it’s crushing, it’s everything King Lear is—and it’s effortless. I was blown away by the imagination, intellect and talent it must have taken to do that."

"From the first lines of Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/ we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/ we drink and we drink it Celan’s poems are terrifying and beautiful, many of them reflect his experience of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp, he was imprisoned in a labor camp. Language is Celan’s tool of combat and survival, and of the evocation of memory. I have always preferred poetry and prose to fiction. Poetry condenses."