"This was the first in a series of books that feature a mouse, a vain cat, and a wombat. Everything the wombat says is nonsense (“Oh wonderful, fish—my favorite fruit.”), and it made me howl with laughter as a kid. I was brought up in East Africa, and was at school with all the international kids. We’d all been given our copies of A.A.Milne and Dr. Seuss, but people know those books. The Muddleheaded Wombat deserves a place among them."

"This seems to me one of the most delicately melancholy and yet vibrantly beautiful films I’ve ever seen. It’s heartbreaking and infuriating, convoluted and yet transparent. The color, fabrics, and décor make me wish I could relocate into a world of low, heavy light, constricting clothing, and dank, long halls even at the expense of my own happiness. I also have to bring up my other favorite Wong Kar-wai film Chungking Express. It’s just as beautiful, but slightly more lighthearted."

"I guess I’ll have to do one horror movie because it’s my thing; I love horror movies. So my favorite horror movie would be… [pauses] I guess I’ll just go with a recent one that I really like right now, which was Insidious. I actually really liked that. It was kind of like, in some ways kind of campy, but it was so fun the way it was done. I loved the storyline of it all, and the ending was really cool."

"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."

"My favorite French film of this century that wasn’t directed by Gasper Noé. Even though it’s mainly infamous for its three very explicit sex scenes, this is really an intense love story—girl meets girl, girl loses girl—and completely heart-wrenching at times. It’s three-hour length flies by. I easily could have watched another three hours of these absolutely incredible performances. I can’t wait to see what Adèle does next. I could not take my eyes off of her."

"I saw Le samouraï for the first time at Cinema 21 in Portland, Oregon, when I was a teenager. The main reason I went was because of an ad in the alternative weekly that said it was John Woo’s favorite movie (which meant a lot to me when I was sixteen). Over the last twenty or so years I have enjoyed it for many reasons: Alain Delon’s embodiment of cool, its evocation of 1960s Paris, its melancholy reflection on self-sufficiency and isolation."

"I have Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown”. I just think it’s the best R&B song ever created. And it’s just always been one of my favorite, not just Motown songs, but just a perfectly crafted pop song. It gets kind of lost in a shuffle of a million great Motown songs, in a bygone era, but listen to Smokey Robinson’s voice, listen to the arrangement of the song and tell me if you can find one that is better."

"I first saw this film on a Criterion laserdisc in the study center at USC. Fifteen years later (jeezus), if I had a favorite film, this would probably be it. In fact, I’ve just spent twenty minutes typing then erasing inane superlative descriptions of it. For me it redefined what a film could be-both singularly cinematic and as dense, delicate, and complex as a great novel. That was no less inane than the others, but I’m going to let it slide."

"I think one of my favorite films of all time is Star 80. I’m a huge [Bob] Fosse fan, and I love that movie. There’s something about it; the music, Eric Roberts is so incredible in that movie. There’s something about the way he made that movie; it sort of lulls you into this comfortable state, and then all of a sudden it’s absolutely horrifying. It’s also kind of funny and ironic at times and winky. I just think he was a genius."

"Like Orwell, Twain is better-known for his canonical fiction, but he was also a genius of observation, and this early work, which is broadly non-fiction, about his early career as a riverboat pilot, is my favorite. It’s not uproarious, like “Roughing It,” but it dives deep into its milieu. “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve.”"