"When I was fifteen, I caught a portion of Throne of Blood on television and couldn’t get it out of my mind. It set me off on a quest through video store shelves to figure out what it was I had seen, and I began by watching both Kagemusha and Seven Samurai on my way to finally rediscovering Throne of Blood. This pretty much sparked my interest in the classics. I cheated on this list by choosing three films, but I think it’s difficult to ever recommend just one Kurosawa film. Here’s a little side story: I used to encourage my friends to watch older movies back in high school, but they mostly found them to be dreadfully boring. The night before we were leaving for a snowboarding trip, I suggested watching a little bit of Seven Samurai. Now mind you, these are dudes who pretty much only watched the latest action movies or comedies. By the time intermission(!) came up, everyone had decided they needed to see the rest of this nearly four-hour epic instead of snowboarding in the morning. I highly recommend Seven Samurai for the reluctant classic movie watcher. It might just change some lives, but it can certainly change people’s perceptions of older films and remind them that “classic cinema” simply refers to old movies that are so awesome they’ve stood the test of time."

"When I was fifteen, I caught a portion of Throne of Blood on television and couldn’t get it out of my mind. It set me off on a quest through video store shelves to figure out what it was I had seen, and I began by watching both Kagemusha and Seven Samurai on my way to finally rediscovering Throne of Blood. This pretty much sparked my interest in the classics. I cheated on this list by choosing three films, but I think it’s difficult to ever recommend just one Kurosawa film. Here’s a little side story: I used to encourage my friends to watch older movies back in high school, but they mostly found them to be dreadfully boring. The night before we were leaving for a snowboarding trip, I suggested watching a little bit of Seven Samurai. Now mind you, these are dudes who pretty much only watched the latest action movies or comedies. By the time intermission(!) came up, everyone had decided they needed to see the rest of this nearly four-hour epic instead of snowboarding in the morning. I highly recommend Seven Samurai for the reluctant classic movie watcher. It might just change some lives, but it can certainly change people’s perceptions of older films and remind them that “classic cinema” simply refers to old movies that are so awesome they’ve stood the test of time."

"When I was fifteen, I caught a portion of Throne of Blood on television and couldn’t get it out of my mind. It set me off on a quest through video store shelves to figure out what it was I had seen, and I began by watching both Kagemusha and Seven Samurai on my way to finally rediscovering Throne of Blood. This pretty much sparked my interest in the classics. I cheated on this list by choosing three films, but I think it’s difficult to ever recommend just one Kurosawa film. Here’s a little side story: I used to encourage my friends to watch older movies back in high school, but they mostly found them to be dreadfully boring. The night before we were leaving for a snowboarding trip, I suggested watching a little bit of Seven Samurai. Now mind you, these are dudes who pretty much only watched the latest action movies or comedies. By the time intermission(!) came up, everyone had decided they needed to see the rest of this nearly four-hour epic instead of snowboarding in the morning. I highly recommend Seven Samurai for the reluctant classic movie watcher. It might just change some lives, but it can certainly change people’s perceptions of older films and remind them that “classic cinema” simply refers to old movies that are so awesome they’ve stood the test of time."

"Even with a nod to some of Hollywood’s best navel-gazing films, I will make a case that this is the best film ever made about filmmaking—made by one of the most self-referential of all filmmakers. Visually lush to the point of a Powell and Pressburger surfeit, Godard’s film lays bare a marriage in crisis. The long apartment sequence between Bardot and Piccoli is a dystopian analogue to the hotel room playful casualness of Seberg and Belmondo in Breathless. A back-to-back viewing of the two sequences constitutes a minihistory of the French New Wave. Raoul Coutard’s cinematography and Georges Delerue’s score give the Greek myth parallels of the film’s story line (and of the film-within-a-film trope) a sensuous subtext—music and image caressing the body of the star of And God Created Woman. It’s great to see Fritz Lang and Jack Palance, two polar opposite cinematic icons, in a room watching dailies. Below the screen is a running legend that reads, “Cinema is an invention without a future. Louis Lumière.” The film’s opening long shot over verbal titles—as the BNC anamorphic camera approaches the viewer along tracking rails, then pans and tilts so that Coutard’s lens points right at you—is one of those great “gotcha” cinematic moments."

"Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time. I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat."

"Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time. I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat."

"One of my great all-time loves in cinema, and I’ve seen it three times, is Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. Not a lot of people may have seen that film. It was made during the Soviet era. I’d be happy to see it again — it is, however, 12 hours long. It took 10 years to make, and some actors lived and died during the period of making the movie. It’s a little bit influenced by being a ’60s film, so it’s got a bit of a trippy edge to it; it’s a little bit abstract. But it has some of the finest examples of Russian acting of that era. I was profoundly affected by the Russian theater and the style of Russian acting. It was shot on cameras and film stock that we simply never have access to. If I’m not mistaken, during the opening credits the camera is in a cosmonaut’s space capsule being shot into Earth. It’s probably the biggest crane shot of all time. At first you think, “Well this is going to be tedious,” but stay with it and I think you’ll find yourself drawn in. And the girl who played Natasha [Lyudmila Savelyeva] is a dead ringer for Audrey Hepburn and she’s one of the most luminous stars that ever found herself on the screen."