"Dumbo is my favorite movie of all time. A remarkable motion picture. Just over 60 minutes, it’s so tight in terms of storytelling. It’s like [snaps fingers]. When you have kids and you watch Dumbo, it really nails you because there’s that “Baby Mine” sequence. I like [Dumbo] because it’s the most cartoony of Disney features. I like it because the main character doesn’t talk. Such a wonderful film. It is very funny. Great music. It also really moves you. It has a really huge heart. Walt Disney always said that for every laugh, there should be a tear. I live by that."

"Another one of my favorite movies in the whole world is A Soldier’s Story. It was originally a play but this one stars Denzel Washington and David Allen Grier and Howard E. Rollins. [It’s set] in World War II, it’s about the racial divide in the army, but it’s also about a murder mystery, but then it also dealt with the social class differences, and so that was another one that — [Norman] Jewison directed that; he really hit the nail on the head. Very well written, very well acted, another movie I could quote from top to bottom."

"Would be in the top five. Because I’m from New Zealand, and the movie was very impactful when I saw it. It was so incredible to see a story about the beginnings of my country of New Zealand. Well, not the beginnings, because there were indigenous people there, but when the settlers came, it’s just such an interesting story to see. And also, it was all filmed around where I grew up, and I’ve never seen a movie that was filmed in the part of the world that I grew up in. And Jane Campion is one of my favorite filmmakers."

"I’m a film school nerd, so I’ve got about a hundred favorite movies. I’d feel like I was cheating on all of them if I narrowed it down to five movies. But con man movies I can do. In no particular order, I guess the first one I’d name is Paper Moon, which, for me, is just a perfect film. It’s also one of the first con man movies I saw that was less about the mechanics of plot and more about the relationships between the characters, and this father-daughter relationship, which is really beautiful. Just a pretty wonderful movie."

"One more. Let me say Persona, one of my favorite movies of all time. That’s another one that I saw later. I saw it in my twenties, like 20 to 21 or something. It feels like it wasn’t made by a human being, because what it does is like magic. I could never imagine making something of that level. It’s just a beautiful thing of its own, and it blew me away. I don’t know how to talk about it. I love a lot of his stuff, but that one – man – it’s one of the greatest movies of all time."

"One of my favorite reads from those fundamental years of art school, I first discovered this book when trying to come to terms with western Enlightenment culture’s broad impact on ideation in artistic practice. So much of Enlightenment thinking is poisoned by prior notions of race that one must ask: Is it ever possible to separate some of our greatest understandings derived from the Enlightenment era from its problematic history? In Race and the Enlightenment, Eze examines foundational writings on race by major Enlightenment figures and lays bare the toxic notions of their time in their own words."

"Le plaisir is probably my favorite Ophuls movie. It’s three stories by Guy de Maupassant. The camera work in this movie (as in all of Ophuls’s movies) is astounding. The masked figure dancing in the first story is incredibly haunting. Then there are the tracking shots from window to window at the bordello in the second story. And there’s a camera move in the third story that, given the equipment of the time, has to be one of the best in film history (I can’t say what it is or it’ll ruin the story—you’ll know it when you see it)."

"Number four would be a movie called The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke. That’s a really interesting character study to me, and that is my other favorite on-screen performance, Isabelle Huppert. I just think it’s a really, really interesting character study; again, disturbing. I guess there’s a theme here. [laughs] And her last frame of acting in that movie — not actually the last frame; the last frame is her walking, but the one before that is the best piece of acting I’ve ever seen in my entire life. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you have to go watch it."