"This is about an East German singer who has a botched sex-change operation and is left with an “angry inch” of flesh between her legs. Moving to the US, she gets involved with another singer, who steals her songs and becomes famous, while Hedwig, played by the director John Cameron Mitchell, ends up playing in a chain of seafood restaurants called Bilgewater’s. It’s a beautiful film that touches on Greek mythology and the origins of love, as well as gender identity. It’s a lot of fun too – a comedy with a serious message. And the songs are great."

"Last one is A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. I don’t think it’s up there on most people’s lists. I just think it’s so beautiful. It’s very funny, but very gentle, and it also deals with issues of life and death in a very serious way. I can remember every time I saw it crying at the end. And part of it, too, is [Woody Allen] makes this incredibly good use of Mendelssohn’s music. I think the entire score is — I’m not sure about the soundtrack — but the score is Mendelssohn. I just think it’s a really exquisite piece of filmmaking."

"It’s difficult to watch The Great Dictator without thinking about how the world was about to be plunged into five years of war and horror, and it saturates everything with more wistful sadness than Chaplin probably could have imagined. It’s a comedy at the end of the world . . . this brief and desperate beam of optimism, laughing in the face of evil, just before everything went dark. These two Chaplin releases, as well as The Gold Rush and City Lights, are among the most amazing-looking Blu-rays I’ve seen. Could Criterion please do the same restoration work for Buster Keaton next?"

"A masterpiece. Kubrick is one of the most fascinating directors of all time. The fact that this movie sits alongside 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining in his filmography is mind-boggling. Peter Sellers was so understated. This movie constantly reminds me how comedy is funnier when you ground it in real circumstances. The more dramatic the stakes, the more you can mine laughs out of people who have to squirm through those situations. I still try to emulate Kubrick’s sense of editing and composition. I patterned a war room scene in Get Smart after the one in Strangelove."

"It’s difficult to watch The Great Dictator without thinking about how the world was about to be plunged into five years of war and horror, and it saturates everything with more wistful sadness than Chaplin probably could have imagined. It’s a comedy at the end of the world . . . this brief and desperate beam of optimism, laughing in the face of evil, just before everything went dark. These two Chaplin releases, as well as The Gold Rush and City Lights, are among the most amazing-looking Blu-rays I’ve seen. Could Criterion please do the same restoration work for Buster Keaton next?"

"This was the first picture I ever worked on and the one I learned the most from. John Lasseter is an amazing director and I was a wide eyed little punker who was lucky enough to watch him work every day. (John drove a Honda then, now he literally has a Nascar!) I got the chance to animate Buzz Lightyear for %#$@’s sake! Seriously though, it’s an incredible story with amazing characters and the amazing comedy talents of Andrew Stanton and late great Joe Ranft flowing out of it. After working on Toy Story I just assumed that’s how it was done."

"The amazing thing about W. C. Fields’s comedy is how much mileage he can get out of almost no plot and very little dialogue. The humor comes from his gleeful disdain of American propriety, and from his impeccable sense of timing and absurdity. He can build a comic routine out of the pronunciation of “proboscis” and of such names as “Egbert Souse.” Fields’s movies have few frills, and the same is true of this straightforward single-disc version, but the performance and the movie are as bracing as a shot or two of late-morning whiskey."