"This trilogy was rereleased at Film Forum in the summer of 2015, right before we started shooting Menashe. I went once a week and cried in the theater by myself. A universal story of birth, death, love, and coming of age. So many moments I can never forget: the joy of the school montage, and the famous scene in which the children see a train for the first time, a symbol of the arrival of modernity."

"This trilogy was rereleased at Film Forum in the summer of 2015, right before we started shooting Menashe. I went once a week and cried in the theater by myself. A universal story of birth, death, love, and coming of age. So many moments I can never forget: the joy of the school montage, and the famous scene in which the children see a train for the first time, a symbol of the arrival of modernity."

"Once again, we see sex and death wed like chocolate and peanut butter. Jane Fonda looks like the angel of bitter, angry suicide girls before such girls were ever born. Bruce Dern plays the psycho hillbilly we loved him playing in ‘The Big Valley’ on television. Gig Young claws his way to the bottom of the bottom-feeders, winning the Oscar just before his own real-life suicide. Here’s my favorite “date movie” of all time."

"I always go back to Death on the Stairs, the Libertines song. I love that tune. It’s the story it tells, it takes me to a place so far away and yet so familiar. It’s really hard though - I don’t believe in first or best or worse, I'm into liberty and verse - as Pete once sang [in a demo for The Libertines’ The Man Who Would be King]. It’s like going through your kids and picking your favourite child"

"Now, my favorite films as a more mature person, when I was learning about what the director is and does, probably a lot of them were Howard Hawks movies, like Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo. In Hawks’ world, Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo are his visions of adventure stories with male groups, and men and women’s relationships, and life and death and danger. He’s developed that idea throughout his career. Those are just his beliefs."

"This is the second film on my list about a dying man, and like Hunger, it’s based on true events. Bob Fosse came to feature filmmaking by way of dance, which is entirely evident here. This film features a lot of actors dancing, dancers acting, and dancers dancing. It’s a sweaty and sexy take on the stress and fragility of the creative process. Plus, it features an early-career Jessica Lange as the Angel of Death."

"Light and sky. Rain and wind. Sea and smoke. These are the fearsome natural elements that Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” explores, creating a modern cinema that manages to look both backward and forward. Backward, to an almost square format and to the visual sorcery of Bergman and Dreyer, of Herzog and Lang. But forward as well, to Eggers’ own imagining of a peculiarly American past, and toward his own brutal conception of masculinity in a death match with itself… "

"The breathtaking beauty of Alameddine’s prose alone makes this compulsive reading. Its true genius, however, lies in the sacrosanct ideas that the narrator—a translator of books that will never be read—lays bare with humorous irreverence, wry insouciance, or intellectual outrage. She is fearless in looking at aging and death, the morality of war and survival, and the true meaning of a meaningful life. She also gives advice on not dying your hair blue in bad light."