"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.”"

"This is my favorite novel of the past decade. It’s so sexy, scandalous and hysterically depressing. It follows two conniving brothers as they pull of jewelry scams, take a ton of cocaine, sleep with hookers, and generally make questionable life decisions. It’s largely based on the writer’s own experiences, and after I read it I became sort of sexually obsessed with him, and would fantasize about him constantly. I eventually started sending him erotic messages on Facebook, but he never replied."

"Few films have ever satiated my appetite for an experience of pure cinema the way Cul-de-sac did the first night I watched it. It’s a film that doesn’t strictly belong to any one genre but dances between thriller, psychological horror, and comedy. One of my favorite actors, the hugely undervalued Donald Pleasence, turns in a career-best performance as a highly pedantic, sexually frustrated, oddball English husband, while his fiery young French wife is played with dangerous irresistibility by Françoise Dorléac."