"“Serpentine!” The funniest movie ever made. A buddy comedy with unparalleled chemistry between the two leads, Peter Falk and Alan Arkin (and Cassavetes’s DNA is at work even beyond the Falk connection, as John would replace the director of the disappointing not-quite-a-sequel, 1986’s Big Trouble). Falk and Arkin are a mismatch made in heaven. Rumor has it this was Brando’s favorite movie and is the reason he signed on to The Freshman, which was written and directed by The In-Laws scribe Andrew Bergman. Richard Libertini almost manages to steal the film in the last act as an eccentric Central American dictator/ventriloquist/art-lover."

"I love that Criterion not only focuses on the classic work of the Fellinis, the Bergmans and the Kurosawas of film history but also gives attention to controversial, camp, and cult films like Salò, Head, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Pink Flamingos. And none is more strangely perfect than House. One of the most beautifully strange and original films I’ve ever seen. Almost like a psychedelic, live-action Japanese version of an episode of Teletubbies, H.R. Pufnstuf, or Scooby-Doo. The fact that both this and Eraserhead came out in the same year leads me to believe there were some really good drugs floating around in 1977."

"I don’t hesitate to state that no one becomes a great writer without drinking from the spring of fables. Sometimes their influence shows on the surface and at other times it remains hidden inside the story like bones in a body. In this magnificent collection of dark stories, Vollmann — who many consider having written the Great American Novel more than once — proves himself a master storyteller whose pitcher of that fabled water never runs dry. Drawing on sources from the North, The South, The East and the West he takes us on a journey through many last nights on earth and in the worlds beyond."

"In a politically fractious America in which “bearing witness” has been attacked as a motive for art in recent years, emerging writers have nonetheless written boldly across divides of class, ethnic identity, and gender. Outstanding among these has been Anthony Marra, a young American author whose first two books are set mainly in Russia and the former Soviet Union. In A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Marra’s debut novel, three survivors of the Second Chechen War band together in an abandoned hospital. In 2015’s The Tsar of Love and Techno, linked short stories follow various characters’ dreams and dashed hopes from the 1930s to the present, and then beyond."