"These are all based on books, right? And the most amazing source material, tonal source material. The Exorcist has, again, a collision of the time period with that style of cinema, but Friedkin’s kind of unlike the previous two. They did a bunch of ad-libby stuff, but The Exorcist was the most with regard to that contemporaneous kind of shooting. The story is about a reality-based story about the Devil, done at a time when docu-style was predominant, and it felt really natural. Friedkin spent an enormous amount of time shooting the movie and did it with reverence, and the structure is perfect. It starts in the Middle East, goes to a Georgetown bedroom, and gets smaller and smaller until you meet a side character, the second priest. The plot is this incredible kind of twisty thing, and then he ends up sacrificing himself. It’s awesome."

"""It’s just amazing. I’ve been watching all of the Maysles Brothers‘ films and I’m really into their approach, which they called “direct cinema”, and the whole school that came out of DA Pennebaker, Robert Drew and so on. I love the whole idea that life can be as dramatic as fiction. It’s very different than reality television, because that’s very manipulated. The Maysles’ approach is minimal interaction and being as observational as possible. Gimme Shelter has such drama, and it’s so well-done. As are all of their films. I also love Salesman, which also proves that their philosophy can really work, because it just has these real Bible salesmen. But to me it has as much drama and tension as Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill – it’s like the Death of a Salesman and The Iceman Cometh all rolled together – but it’s real! I just can’t get enough of it."""

"Next, I’ll go with The Tree of Life. Terry Malick – I’ve had the pleasure to work for him on a few things, and that changed the course of my life. But seeing The Tree of Life in a cinema was like one of the most humbling and beautiful experiences I’ve had. It’s cosmic, you know? It’s intimate but cosmic. It’s family but everything bigger. I had a religious experience in the theater watching that. There are shots in it that I worked on, and I know where we were for that, but it was bizarre to be having this religious experience and think, “Oh my God. I was involved, in a small capacity, with making it.” That movie, it’s just one of my favorite movies of all time. I loved working with Terrence Malick. I love his other films in that I don’t even know how to talk about him. Honestly."

"OK look, I have only seen this film once and I will never watch it again. But the effect it had on me was so profound that it kind of shifted things creatively inside me. I went to the cinema one night in London with two very good friends when I was 24. It blew me away. It’s so raw and so poetic at the same time. Emily Watson was sublime. I came out of the theater in a daze and the three of us wandered around the streets of Soho for hours not quite knowing what to do with ourselves. I literally didn’t sleep all night. I just lay there in my hotel room reliving the story. Even now I can see the bleak color palette, the camera moves, and Emily’s naive face. Lars Von Trier is a genius. Every film he makes is so honest and powerful."

"As of this writing, it’s been nearly a year since we lost the talent and spirit of Chantal Akerman. Her 1975 breakthrough feature wowed the international film world after premiering at Cannes to a combination of raves and an audience exodus. Truly a film to return to again and again, Jeanne Dielman expands the possibilities of cinema as an art form. Its durational, physiological impact on the viewer is an absolute revelation. I first saw it on a crappy 16 mm print in college in the late 1980s and didn’t get to see it again on the big screen until the late ’90s—on 35 mm at the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival. Now I like to watch it in segments on Hulu (sort of the opposite of binge-watching) just for the shift in consciousness it induces in me after each twenty-minute chunk. Transcendent."

"Years ago, during those quaint days of DVD-by-mail rental, I made a dork pact with one of my friends that for several weeks straight we’d only watch films in the Criterion Collection. Additionally, they had to be films we didn’t know much about. The experience was a total revelation. There were so many amazing films that I discovered during those weeks that made me really rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about the history of cinema. Films like Ballad of a Soldier, Death of a Cyclist, René Clair comedies like À nous la liberté or Le million, American indie landmarks like Symbiopschycotaxiplasm and the stunning Ermanno Olmi pair from the early 60s Il posto and I fidanzati. But the one from this period that I always recommend to friends is Green for Danger, a delightful British murder mystery that I had never heard of."

"Like many of the films on this list, Arabian Nights showed me that the possibilities of working with narrative are the possibilities of working with the world. This film makes beautiful use of a documentary approach to filmmaking but within the framework of fiction. It’s filled with these faces you don’t generally see in cinema, faces that remind me of people from that region in Italy. I’m not Italian, but there’s something there that made me feel, as a Brazilian, that I was connected to these faces and these characters. It’s also a fantastic way of looking at a classic piece of literature—I am a big fan of One Thousand and One Nights, and this is an adaptation you can connect to, that doesn’t feel far away at all. There’s a sexiness and a rawness, and a sense of pulsating reality being brought to the screen on a poetic level."

"Interrupted by the arrival of the talkies, the oeuvre of Victor Sjöström remains one of the summits of silent cinema. Even if we no longer pay too close attention to The Wind, despite it having been regarded for so long as one of the masterpieces of film history; as also the lesser known The Phantom Carriage, despite it having been a foundational inspiration to Ingmar Bergman, who watched it ritually every year; and even if he is most often remembered for his role in Wild Strawberries; Victor Sjöström is the auteur of a visionary and profound body of work, that makes him equal to his great contemporaries Dreyer and Murnau. For my part, it is The Outlaw and His Wife, inspired by the true story of an 18th-century Icelandic outlaw played in the film by Sjöström himself, which has left the most indelible mark on me."