"Spinal Tap — I think you could make an easy argument that that’s the funniest movie ever. It’s just top to bottom quotable and brilliant, and I guess improvised? I’m curious to know how much of it was improvised. But it’s a tremendous movie."

"The way that Gillo Pontecorvo makes his political points without resorting to propaganda—while always being truthful to the characters—is utterly brilliant. It’s a true-life thriller that doesn’t resort to a single cliché. The music is also unequaled in film."

"Set in the post-Civil War era, I was hooked from the first page on this tale of loss, and ultimately hope. The character development was incredible, and the story was inspiring. It’s a brilliant follow-up to Before We Were Yours."

"Wildness and control are recurring themes in Phillips’s brilliant poems, and they play out too in his winding, meticulous, everywhere self-interrogating syntax. He is our metaphysical poet, using the desiring, sexual body to ask poetry’s eternal questions in distinctively contemporary ways"

"In my personal canon, Frank Bidart is the gold standard, the most important living American writer. His discomfiting poems delve into extremes of emotion that would defeat almost any other writer. Fearless, brilliant, they remind me what the stakes of art should be."

"First of all, it’s just a brilliant play, and then seeing the film and seeing those incredible performances and direction — it’s just one of those films. I first saw it when I was 15 or 16, and I decided to be an actress."

"I could watch the work of Wong Kar-wai (and the brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle) all day long. I don’t have to understand what’s going on . . . I don’t care. Beautiful people, photographed beautifully. His films are the best, most romantic out there."