"Hey let’s lighten it up a bit shall we? This isn’t even my favorite Albert Brooks movie (that would be the amazing and prescient Real Life) but this is the funniest. Maybe one of the funniest movies ever. I’m not going to try to give written down examples as they will lose a great deal in that process. Just please go get it and watch it. The scene where he takes the Valium and then has to deal with a couple of — f**k it, trust me, every scene is funny and smart."

"The Apartment, Jack Lemmon movie. That is a great movie. Again, it’s watching humans trying to live their lives, but beautifully done. Billy Wilder generally, I’m a great admirer of his work. Some Like it Hot is perhaps the more obvious choice, but there’s a kind of extra wackiness to Some Like it Hot, which I like less. But The Apartment is a fairly proper, serious movie, but with some wonderful social observations and ironies. And of course, it’s just a fabulous performance from Jack Lemmon, one of my very favorite performers."

"As anyone who has ever picked up a pair of knitting needles can attest to, knitting is a laborious love. When a pair of socks can take weeks to knit, and a blanket months (or even years), there’s something slightly sacrilegious about a book of shorts about knitting. But somehow these writers capture the essence of hours spent stitching, without the expected verbose prose. The third story written by Andre Dubus III is a particular favorite of mine — capturing both the historical and personal legacy of knitting in a short heartfelt gem."

"[One of my favorite tracks is] ‘Clap Your Hands’ and I don’t know what it’s called but they sampled Biz on it, which I can’t remember, but it’s a record about trying to party out. ‘Yeah, I know it looks pathetic/Ali Shaheed Muhammad got me doing calisthenics.’ ‘The Chase Part II’—that’s my other one where I can just turn it on and I don’t care if I got 50 people at my house partying or I am just doing the dishes, it just sets the tone like, ‘Yeah man, life is good.’"

"One of my favorite films of recent years is A History of Violence, but I don’t share the notion that we are implicated in its violence. Where is the conflict in seeing psycho killers rubbed out? In Leonard Kastle’s sole film, however, we are painfully implicated. The victims, all defenseless women and a child, are brutally murdered in a context so unreasonably entertaining that we hate ourselves for not turning away. The setup for the most grueling of these murders appears to be an homage to the Turkish-bath scene in Children of Paradise."

"I don’t know many people who have seen this movie, but it’s great. Are you a dog person or a cat person? Forget Cat People with Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell—not that the two animalistic movies have much in common other than dangerous, large-fanged creatures and a bit of 1980s spandex. Who knows what possessed Samuel Fuller to cast that straight-shooting seventies TV star Kristy McNichol as the lead? But no arguments here! White Dog is suspenseful, poignant, and entertaining, plus it features some of your favorite Roger Corman all-stars!"

"I would say it’s one of my all-time favorite movies. There were times in my life when I had to watch Sans Soleil once a year, and I could because there was a cinema in Vienna that used to show it every summer. On one hand, it’s a perfect and artistic movie, but on the other, it’s like the basis of moviemaking. It’s an essay film dealing with documentary material, and it transforms it into a poetic idea of the world. For me, it’s the highlight of documentary filmmaking."

"Thank you, Criterion, for putting this amazingly creepy film out into the world in such a beautiful, definitive way. This is by far one of my favorite psychological horror films of all time. The Criterion version was an unbelievable step up from the VHS copy I had of this for years, when the film was strangely titled Corridors of Evil, for some reason. Carnival of Souls is like a fever-dream-elongated Twilight Zone episode. It’s a masterpiece, and I love falling asleep to the film as well. It induces great, strange dreams."

"My parents got divorced when I was about eight, and after that I moved with my mother from St. Louis to Boston. I became her movie pal, and she would take me to some very inappropriate movies! This was one of them. The Graduate has one of my favorite montages ever—that one where Dustin Hoffman jumps off a diving board and lands on Anne Bancroft’s chest! It’s sexy and beautiful, but it also captures how this young man spirals into a state of jadedness over the course of a summer."

"Robert Altman really deserves his own number and section, so I am tying three of his films. He was one of the rare filmmakers experimenting with form within the Hollywood system. He infused his work with fluid zooms to easily enter in and out of spaces and made social interactions feel more organic. He also used sound in experimental ways, pushing the form with overlapping dialogue. It’s so impressive that a studio funded an entire film based on a fever dream he had, starring two of my favorite actresses, Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek."