"I can’t explain this movie. It’s just perfection. Sad and funny, light and heavy, full of boisterous color and nonstop singing. Probably the most romantic movie I have ever seen. Catherine Deneuve has never been so lovely. I have never been to France, but I imagine it is just like it is depicted here. Maybe I will never go so I can keep my fantasy and save myself from disappointment. Jacques Demy was a singular talent. There was never anyone like him and there never will be again. I highly recommend the entire box set of his work, but this one will always be my favorite. I remember seeing it on the big screen at the Music Box in Chicago in the early nineties and walking out on clouds while also being filled with an intense melancholy. I can’t think of a single other movie that makes me feel both of those things at the same time and has left those feelings lingering inside me twenty-plus years later. Michel Legrand’s score is, it goes without saying, iconic and magnificent. And what this movie lacks in dancing, Demy makes up for in his constant gliding camera movements. As if the dance is between the actors and his lens. Pure cinema. Perfection."

"This movie is still my favorite movie of last year, and I think I have to name it because I just thought it was an extraordinary film and I still think about it a lot. I saw it in the theater and it really hit me like a ton of bricks. I think he’s a really extraordinary director, David Michôd. Ben Mendelsohn and Jackie Weaver — every single performance in that I was so impressed with, but in particular just the direction. That’s a director that I appreciate the sense that he allows his actors to just act and have these really quiet moments, and he really just created this world — the atmosphere of that movie was amazing. For a first film, too. The way that he was able to create a level of tension with actors not really saying much or doing much, it was just what he did with the camera. There are not a lot of films where you can just appreciate the camerawork and what a significant aspect of the whole film it is. It was perfectly curated."

"I think my second favorite film is Apocalypse Now, partly because I’m 58 years old, and I grew up with Vietnam on the television. That movie is just such an amazing journey, and it was really terrifying to watch. There were just so many elements of that film that just left a big impression on me when I saw it. I think I saw it — when did it come out? In ’78, ’79? It was just an amazing film. For me, not having served, it kind of articulated and revealed the fear I think I would’ve had, had I had to go. There were just so many elements about that film that were terrifying. It was fascinating filmmaking, and I love that film. In my career, I finally got to work with Bobby Duvall, he played my father in the movie I did with Billy Bob Thornton [Jayne Mansfield’s Car], but to talk to Bobby about those sequences and what that was like, and how it was like to shoot… It’s a pretty profound movie."