"In this masterpiece from our dearly departed Chantal Akerman, there is so much pathos in the pacing alone. The deep tensions in the film, which concern sex and violence and domesticity and motherhood, unfold with a sense of unrelenting inertia. Jeanne Dielman epitomizes my favorite kind of person in film and in real life—the unruly woman."

"I have got to say Man on Fire. Again, it’s another assassin movie, but Denzel…that was one of my favorite performances from him. And I think the film was shot really stylistically; I don’t know what kind of filter they had on the camera, or what they used, but it just had this really cool element to it."

"Another favorite of my vanished youth that withstands the test of time. It’s a huge, rolling pageant of a film, and Carné and Jacques Prévert get down and dirty with the Paris of the mid-nineteenth century, from which Arletty’s Garance surges up irrepressible and unscathed by the turbulence of life about her in the theater world."

"My personal favorite from Jim Jarmusch, one of our finest American auteurs. If as filmmakers we’re all just laboriously trying to simulate the rush of texture and emotion you get from listening to great music, no one has ever come closer to smacking the heart of a Tom Waits tune up there on the screen than Jarmusch."

"I really actually liked this one. There’s a thing with genre movies and science fiction movies that number two is the charmed; two seems to be the best. I loved Terminator 2. I think of all those kinds of movies, that has to be my favorite ‘blowing big shit up’ kind of movie. How many is that so far?"