"It’s very hard for me to pick a favorite Douglas Sirk movie, but ultimately it’s this one, a sumptuous tearjerker with Sirk’s signature cultural critique. The moment when Jane Wyman, after sacrificing her own happiness for her children, receives a television set as a Christmas gift in lieu of their presence shatters me every time. No one understood melodrama like Sirk, or how to sharpen it into the dagger it’s meant to be."

"A society on the brink of defiance and revolution, and a generation that’s sick and tired of being sick and tired. In some years and some countries, they riot. In 1990 America, they talk it out. Easily one of the most influential American films of the last twenty-five years, Richard Linklater’s exploration of bored youth is mesmerizing. This film would help its titular term become a phenomenon, as well as put Austin, Texas, on the cultural map."

"This is a novel, but it's all basically the true story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. It describes the LSD experience as well as its cultural implications in a way that anyone can grasp and feel. It's also a contemporary novelist at the height of his powers. It was crucial for my own development, showing me how to find and chronicle a seemingly esoteric movement. It was my model for my first real book, Cyberia."

"Many slashers have been made since with diminishing returns, and I think a lot of this film’s power, to me, relies on its honest channeling of the political and cultural violence endemic in the U.S. at the time. On an aesthetic level, the opening credits’ invocations of black-and-red sun flares are such a thrilling cosmic omen for the violence to follow, and the final shots of Leatherface spinning in circles before a setting sun are, to me, sublime."

"In film school, I took a critical-studies course on Bresson. He's a filmmaker I'm certain I would never have experienced if I hadn't been forced to. And I really fell in love. This is my favorite of his films. There's a distance in his filmmaking, an artifice in his staging, that makes it feel mythic. This story felt so familiar to me, like it echoed my own teenage experience of being a girl, the terror of sex, puberty, love, industrialization, cultural apathy."