"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."

"I gotta throw a musical in there, and I’d go with The Band Wagon. Singin’ in the Rain is more exuberant, but [Vincent] Minnelli is one of my favorite stylists in cinema. You know, I love {Fred] Astaire, and I’m crazy about that film. I’ve loved it since I was in high school. Often, these favorites come and go, and they change position on your list, and you make room for other things that maybe you didn’t appreciate as strongly when you were younger, but I’ve always been crazy about that movie."

"High and Low is my personal favorite Kurosawa movie. I love everything about it: the chamber piece of the first half, the sprawling police hunt that follows, the fact that Toshiro Mifune’s character is so committed to making high-quality women’s shoes. And there are so many great moments throughout: the pink smoke, the train sequence, the amazing ending scene. I find it so stunning and effective, and I love the way the film gets at themes of class and social inequality in the form of such an exciting procedural crime thriller."

"I’m cheating again, because this isn’t a movie at all. It’s an episode of an Adult Swim show, and I’ve watched it more than anything else this year. It’s only ten or twelve minutes and it leaves me feeling like I’m a better person. It is warm and cozy and fills me with compassion and hope for humanity. It is also a celebration of my favorite meal. I look forward to many more viewings in the year to come, whenever I need a pick-me-up, large or small."

"A life’s work may occupy shelf upon shelf, or all the genius may be distilled down to a concentrate of wisdom, and I would love to think that I’ve ever thought anything as clearly as Bishop has thought each of her poems. My favorite lines forever: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."

"If you’re forced to pick a sixties Godard, you do it without worry and with as much Godardian esprit, whimsy, impulse, and movie love as you can, and no one’s choice can be better or worse than anyone else’s. I can’t say exactly why this one is my favorite—it’s a vacation travelogue amid genial diatribes and ironic pastiches, four-dimensional masterpieces all—but I can say that when I interviewed Anna Karina (who is very tall, by the way), she guessed that it was, and she also kissed me."

"I like The King of Comedy by Scorsese. I like that one. It makes me laugh a lot. I think it’s very funny. I mean, I like the combination, the trio of Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis and Sandra Bernhard; that’s just one of my favorite trios in a movie. The three of them had a pretty amazing chemistry, I thought. I’ve heard that Scorsese was reluctant to make it, that it was on the shelf for a while; I guess that makes me appreciate it even more."

"I love this movie and a lot of people that I talk to haven’t seen it. I love this movie so much, and I always find out that nobody that I ask has seen it, so I’ve actually shown that movie to a lot of people. It’s kind of a fun one where it just keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time and questioning what’s gonna happen next. I love movies like that. [Kevin] Spacey‘s definitely one of my favorite actors, so I’m sold with that to begin with."

"On the surface the Odyssey is a hero’s book about journey and adventure, but just beneath the main storyline rests a feminist arc of subtly navigating a man’s world without sacrificing your ideals. For me, Penelope, Odysseus’s faithful wife, is my favorite character. A skilled manipulator, Penelope cunningly evades unwanted suitors by claiming to knit or weave (depending on the translation you read) a funeral shroud for her elderly Father-in-Law. She pledges that upon completion of the shroud, she will remarry, but as a stall tactic she secretly undoes her work at night."