"I'm thinking first of this American movie in color, for its '70s-based reverie. For the myth of the road movie, the journey across the states, the speed, the photographed youth, almost like a Robert Frank of cinema in color. The simple light and opaque nights, from a time where the movies were very sensitive to emotions but the rolls insensitive to light. Back then you needed to light a lot but this movie escaped the rule."

"Directed by the Portugese master Manoel de Oliveira. Mr. de Oliveira made his first film, a silent one in 1929, and is probably shooting something [now]. A very idiosyncratic and unique filmmaker with a very singular sense of storytelling and pace. This is his adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It has probably my favorite last line in cinema – along with “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” – which is, “No one is so good as I, in pretending life is beautiful.”"

"It just really changed my life. I was quite young when I saw it, about 14, but it must have gone in – I ended up wearing the very same jacket as David Hemmings in the film. It's a unique document about what a carve-up it was, the Crimean War. It was a very unpopular film when it came out. I actually flew back from LA to see it in a cinema once, it was shown so rarely."

"Ja’Tovia, my be-all and end-all at the time, took me to see this in the theater. I didn’t know people could make movies that were art. So she started my career by taking me to this and then to Amélie not too long after that. I didn’t know that filmmakers were allowed to go off on tangents, and since I don’t think linearly, this introduced me to the idea that I had a place in cinema."

"Breaking the Waves was a big influence on me when I was studying cinema. It gave me the feeling that it was possible to make a film with just energy, with just a chair and a window. The roughness of the style—it’s like listening to a punk song. And I really loved the way that the female character is portrayed. There is something very disturbing and strong about the tension between sexual energy and spiritual searching."

"Speaking of Un chien andalou, Buñuel has one of the most perfect careers in cinema, and was able to harness lunacy and despair with wit and economy. There are many Buñuel titles in the Criterion Collection, but I chose Belle de jour because it remains so beguiling. I was offered the chance to remake it about twenty years ago, but it seemed like such a futile exercise. Has anyone been more perfectly cast than Deneuve in this film?"

"The second one is Bicycle Thieves, by De Sica. That was the most moving film I’ve ever seen. The scene in there where the dad has lost his bicycle and he takes his kid out for a pizza in 1948 Rome, and the kid is eating it but he’s not ’cause he can’t afford to pay for it, is one of the all-time most moving scenes I’ve ever seen in a cinema. It’s an amazing film."

"I wouldn’t be a filmmaker if it wasn’t for Star Wars. Like most filmmakers in my generation, it showed us the power of cinema, showed us the power of creating another world. It’s so immersive. That’s the first movie that got me into how they made movies. Got really into the special effects and all that stuff. And now I have a huge Star Wars collection that has completely taken over my basement, to my wife’s chagrin."

"Close-up and Blow Out make a great double feature, mainly because their titles sound so cool together but also because you can’t find two better examples of wickedly smart and politically alive “self-referential” cinema that couldn’t be less doctrinaire. Also, because including Brian De Palma proves I’m not a total snob and allows me to plug one of the funniest and most intelligent books of film theory of the past decade, Chris Dumas’s Un-American Psycho."

"Close-up and Blow Out make a great double feature, mainly because their titles sound so cool together but also because you can’t find two better examples of wickedly smart and politically alive “self-referential” cinema that couldn’t be less doctrinaire. Also, because including Brian De Palma proves I’m not a total snob and allows me to plug one of the funniest and most intelligent books of film theory of the past decade, Chris Dumas’s Un-American Psycho."