"I first heard 'Frank Sinatra' when Erasure where recording the album Erasure in 1994 at the Strongroom in Shoreditch East London, which has now become metrosexual electro Grand Central. I love her completely nonchalant don't give a fuck attitude on Hollywood Star, it kind of reminds me of my pre-Erasure work with Pierre Cope - very minimal. On 'Frank Sinatra' she sounds like a Russian Mafia gangster that would kill you stone dead. They're also brilliant live."

"Speaking of snake-ish charmers, enter a young Bob Dylan in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dont Look Back. This may be a documentary, but don’t think for one moment that Dylan isn’t brilliantly putting on a performance as PYT (pretty young thing) “Bobby Dylan, the brilliant folksinger.” And while it’s not to my credit that I could never wrap my mind around folk music, even I am not immune from the oodles of bratty charm that Dylan exudes here."

"This is many people’s least favorite Rohmer film. Yes, the main character is a bit charmless, but the film is astonishingly pure – the story of one man’s journey on foot through Paris, over the course of a few days. It’s also quite dark. We follow the main character's descent into vagrancy, and gradually – like him – start to see Paris from a perspective very unusual for 1950s movies: distant, cold, alienated. A brilliant anomaly among Rohmer’s films. "

"After our son Walker couch-surfed in Rio last year, we felt obliged to take in one of the Brazilian friends he met. She brought a copy of Sebastião Salgado’s beautiful but expensive book Genesis. We felt bad because she doesn’t have a lot of money and also because it is in Portuguese. However, 95% of the book consists of Salgado’s brilliant photographs, which need no translation. It seems that the people with the least often give the most."

"Zoolander. Yeah, I mean, I love Ben Stiller, he’s just a brilliant guy. And I love Will Ferrell in it, too. His character, to me, is just insane and he made such huge choices, and he’s such a weirdo! [laughs] And I love Owen Wilson; I think it’s the best work he’s ever done. And they were both so gorgeous at that time. I know they were making fun of themselves, too, but they both look fantastic. So hilarious."