"P. T. is awesome. I grew up watching Adam Sandler, but this performance lured me into another side of him and blew me away. You’ve just watched Happy Gilmore and then you’re like, I’m going to watch another Adam Sandler movie, and then you see this and you’re like, whoa, brilliant. I realize these selections are all emotional movies for me!"

"Some say Jay McInerney partied too much and it hurt his output, but the fact that the party produced this brilliant, hysterically funny description of the party makes the partying worth it in my book. That the novel’s narrator is based on a young woman who, I’ve heard lately, grew up to become John Edwards’ mistress of course only makes it better."

"I discovered this via Wendy Carlos and it was her version in A Clockwork Orange that just woke me up to that sort of music ever since. It’s just the most amazing song. This is the one perfect pop song and a brilliant piece of music. This is probably my no.1 pop song of all-time as far as I’m concerned."

"Charles Laughton’s brilliant introduction (and also swan song) as a film director, which is a terrible loss for all of us. He fearlessly plunges us into impressionism and surrealism, where few in Hollywood have ever ventured. One can only imagine where he would have gone if he’d continued to direct. With a never-better Robert Mitchum, and a drowned Shelley Winters, yet again."

"I had never heard of this film—I only saw it recently. It’s truly brilliant. An old couple from a small town in Japan decide to visit their children in Tokyo, who disappointingly have little time to spend with them. It’s a film about the misunderstanding between generations and the end of one’s life. It’s romantic, realistic, and very poignant."

"Along with Lynne Ramsey, Nic Roeg is one of my favorite British directors, and he had a brilliant run of incredible, kaleidoscopic films. Don’t Look Now is one of my all-time favorites, but I love this too. It really gets to the heart of feeling alone in the universe. It’s like Five Easy Pieces, but with an alien. It’s also completely bonkers."

"This is a brilliant essay film. It uses some of the tropes of documentary, unearthing and presenting archival footage that cracks history open, drawing connections between previously unconnected historical figures. It also goes beyond that, using other contemporaneous material – ads and cultural artifacts – leading to some trenchant personal reflections. That’s hard to pull off, and very satisfying and throbbing when it succeeds."

"I mean, it’s like a massive, big epic, that is all from Richard Harris, Morgan Freeman, and Clint Eastwood. And that ending is incredible, and it starts with Gene Hackman going, “Death’s got nothing to do with it.” It’s just brilliant. “Fat man, get out of the way.” “Who owns this s–t hole?” I mean, it’s wonderful. And highly quotable."

"This book is brilliant. It’s an unflinching unveiling of the truths of our human nature. Like Beckett, this is a series of rants and musings of a self-destructive, neurotic, irritable and very amusing city dweller. He’s trapped in his own toothache, liver troubles and his procrastinations over authority with his servant. His contradictions deal with fundamental questions that great art offers."