"It all started on an ordinary day, in the most ordinary place in the world.”—Brief Encounter David Lean’s depictions of two ordinary women (Celia Johnson’s Laura and Katharine Hepburn’s Jane) restraining their desires for Trevor Howard and Rosanno Brazzi, respectively, are two of my all-time favorite cinematic portrayals of forbidden heterosexual love. Incidentally, both use the writing of gay playwrights as source material: Brief Encounter is based on Noël Coward’s Still Life, and Summertime adapts Arthur Laurents’s The Time of the Cuckoo."

"There are so many great performances in this movie, it’s hard to pick just one, but the choice for me is obvious. I fell so hard for the character of Tootsie, I guess I never got over it. Definitely my favorite thing Dustin Hoffman has done besides Marathon Man. The scene where Tootsie and Les both have something to tell each other is one of the funniest scenes ever. Teri Garr, Jessica Lange, Dabney Coleman, Doris Belack, Bill Murray, Sydney Pollack, Geena Davis. Sheesh."

"One of my all-time favorite films. I actually woohoo-ed out loud when I saw the announcement of a Criterion release of it! Hal Ashby was one of the greatest American filmmakers of the seventies, and his death was such a loss for the film community. It’s sad to think of what else he could’ve made. The use of Cat Stevens’s music in this film is a great example of a musician’s music forever being linked to a particular film and utilized so effectively."

"Not my favorite Cronenberg film, but one that works, for obvious reasons, extremely well on home video. This was a pivotal movie for me, the film that bridged my adolescent love of horror and fantasy to a cinema of ideas. Just when, umpteen viewings on, I thought I couldn’t possibly get anything new out of it, Criterion drops the full cut of Samurai Dreams, the exquisite soft core J-porn excerpted in the feature, as an extra. The Criterion Collection, putting the bone in bonus since 1984."

"Possibly the first film I rented only because it was on Criterion, without ever having heard a single thing about it. Now it is one of my favorite films of all time. Beautiful example of the company putting support behind a film and elevating it from “cult” to “canon.” I wonder how many fewer people would know about this film if it, like many others, had not been given a proper home video release by the most reputable of companies at exactly the right time."

"I’m a sucker for films of the “boy/girl and his/her dog (lion/bear/whatever)” variety. I love gritty British kitchen-sink dramas of the sixties. I love a good angry-kid coming-of-age film. Kes has it all, minus the sentimentality and anthropomorphism of so many animal films. My heart aches for the kid and his bird—I just want their companionship, his only form of stability, to last forever. Fantastic, bittersweet score by John Cameron. My favorite Ken Loach film. "

"This is such a simple and funny movie that tells what is at its core a very sad story about a young woman trapped in Communist Czechoslovakia. The actors and faces that Milos Forman cast in all the roles are fantastic and real, and the young piano player’s tired and fed-up parents are two of the funniest, most subtle characters I’ve ever seen in a movie. This is one of my favorite movies to turn people on to, since very few people have ever seen it."

"Tennessee Williams’s short stories are eclipsed by his plays, but they are by no means outclassed. His ear for dialogue, his eye for character and his dramatic gifts are as powerful in his stories as they are in his plays. Like the plays, the stories are flavored with a connoisseur’s taste for the strange and bizarre, including cannibalism, incest, rape, castration, nymphomania, alcoholism and murder. My favorite among the stories is the fiendish “Desire and the Black Masseur,” but there are many, many runners-up."

"I’m going to go with one of my favorite comedies of all time, I’m gonna go with Tommy Boy. Yeah, the two of them, [Chris] Farley and [David] Spade together, are just so hilarious. I’ve seen that movie so many times. I’ve become friends with Mr. Spade and it’s just so surreal because I’ve been watching him since I was a kid. I just think he’s so talented. And so is Chris Farley. If I want to get in a good mood, I watch that movie."