"One of the very few westerns, my favorite classical genre, in the Criterion Collection. How to make an almost huis clos in the immensity of Monument Valley? Only Ford had that secret. The apparition of the great John Wayne in the Ford family, as the Ringo Kid, in a beautiful tracking shot, made him a star. Later, Wayne said about Ford: “This made me a star, and I’ll be grateful to him forever. But I don’t think he ever really had any kind of respect for me as an actor until I made Red River for Howard Hawks, ten years later. Even then, I was never quite sure.”"

"“Serpentine!” The funniest movie ever made. A buddy comedy with unparalleled chemistry between the two leads, Peter Falk and Alan Arkin (and Cassavetes’s DNA is at work even beyond the Falk connection, as John would replace the director of the disappointing not-quite-a-sequel, 1986’s Big Trouble). Falk and Arkin are a mismatch made in heaven. Rumor has it this was Brando’s favorite movie and is the reason he signed on to The Freshman, which was written and directed by The In-Laws scribe Andrew Bergman. Richard Libertini almost manages to steal the film in the last act as an eccentric Central American dictator/ventriloquist/art-lover."

"Okay, this might be really cheesy. I can’t stop thinking about The Sandlot. I have a thing for retro movies. I mean, I know it’s not retro for a lot of people, but for me it is because, obviously, my age. The Sandlot is one of my favorite movies because of the storyline and because the characters are so young. It was just so interesting and so cool to see young actors give such big personalities to these characters. It was something that just stuck with me. I remember the lead guy [Tom Guiry] being really cute and just thinking that he was adorable."

"Well, I’m definitely a hopeless romantic and Titanic is one of my favorite movies. It basically came out when I was born, but my mom [showed me] Titanic when I was about — I want to say like eight, nine years old. It’s one of the movies I can never get tired of. I could watch it all the time. Actually, I had a really geeky moment: the make up artist that worked on this last film that I worked on — she had worked on Titanic, and I was like, “No way!” I freaked out and got to see a lot of behind-the-scenes pictures. I was totally fan-girling."

"I first encountered Alex Cox’s sci-fi slamdance when I was a sullen, unworldly, unformed teenager—which is the perfect time to find a movie both as rageful and as hopeful as Repo Man. So much of the film’s DNA has been Brundlefly’d with my own—from its hardcore-punk soundtrack to its corporate-conspiracy mindset—that I rewatch it at least once a year, just to make sure I can still connect with Otto and his legion of goons. And the cover artwork, by the great Jay Shaw, is absolutely my favorite bit of Criterion edition art (I’m still trying to track down a poster on eBay)."

"I really, genuinely don’t like favorite lists because you always leave stuff out. So there are a lot of important films I could put in like The Godfather Part II, perhaps, or The Godfather Part I, but I’m going to go with The Empire Strikes Back for number three only because it’s Empire Strikes Back! I don’t think I need to say why. It’s so good. It takes what arguably could be just a simple science fiction movie and really takes it to this other place that is just so engaging and so believable and dramatic as well. Not overly dramatic, but dramatic. I love that film a great deal."

"Of all the great (but few and far between) movies that truly capture the confusion, misplaced energy and anger of one’s teenage years, this, to me, is the best. At least the closest to nailing what I was feeling at that age. Even though it takes place decades before I was that age and in a country that is 4,000 miles away. There isn’t a false note in the whole movie. And it’s driven by one of my favorite albums of all time, of course The Who’s, Quadrophenia, which explores all those themes and more. And Phil Daniels does a supreme job at conveying all of those missed emotions."

"I can’t forget the well-known facts surrounding Polanski’s flight from the U.S. in 1977, or excuse some of the things he’s said since about women, but somehow this man has made one of my favorite female-driven films. For me, its power lies in the meticulous way it unspools Rosemary’s inevitable undoing. It’s a near-perfect metaphor for the hell that is a woman’s life when she loses her rights over her own body. Rosemary fights as hard as she can to defeat the satanic forces stacked against her, and the tragic futility of that fight reflects a world that is as familiar as it is frightening."

"I sometimes hear films described as “Lynchian,” which, I take it, means that they deal with a certain space between light and darkness (or perhaps it’s just a more sophisticated way of saying that something is flat-out creepy). The Scarlet Empress is David Lynch for 1934 . . . and by that I mean that the lighting design is crucial. I love the scene where the freaky Grand Duke Peter (whom I recognized as the crotchety book salesman from my childhood favorite—the ever-so-slightly psychedelically tinged—Bedknobs and Broomsticks) emerges from the shadows to meet his new bride, the Princess Sophia Frederica (played by Marlene Dietrich) for the first time"

"I’ll start with 25th Hour, the Spike Lee movie. It was actually written by David Benioff, who writes Game of Thrones. It was my favorite movie before I met David, and when I found out that he had written it, I proceeded to — when drunk in a bar once — to give him my version of the Edward Norton monologue that happens during the movie. Really embarrassing. I cringe to this day that I did that and gave him my rendition of it. It’s just an amazing movie. I love Edward Norton, I love Philip Seymour Hoffman in it, Barry Pepper, you know. It’s a fantastic movie."