"It’s one of the great ’50s melodramas, and it’s kind of like a musical without the music, but it has a great score, of course. I saw it in my early- to mid-20s, and it just really affected me. It’s about a guy who goes back to his hometown where his brother is a prominent citizen. He’s a stalled-out, blocked writer, and he’s been a soldier, and a worker, and a would-be novelist, and he’s kind of a gambler and a drinker — this is Sinatra, of course, the conflicted one — and he lives in two worlds. Because he’s a published writer, he has the respect of the local English teacher and her brother — the respectable world of literature — but he really has a soft spot for bars and gambling and floozies and the Shirley MacLaine character. And then you’ve got Gwen French, who’s played by Martha Hyer, who’s the uptight school teacher. So it’s all these opposites colliding — respectability, debauchery… It’s wonderfully melodramatic and beautifully made… It’s about male friendship too. I consider it kind of the first Rat Pack movie, although it’s just Dean and Frank with Shirley around too. It doesn’t have a lot of the other people, but it’s the first one to capture these guys gambling and hanging out and that camaraderie. They become roommates and go on, like, a trip to Terre Haute, IN, to go gambling. It’s just wonderful."

"I saw this when I was in college, and there were a lot of things about it that made me swoon. I watched it over and over again. I couldn’t stop. It does this incredible thing where it stops the narrative, like Godard would, to comment on the story from an omniscient perspective. But where Godard does it in a really cold way, Cuarón does it with such warmth. It made me feel like you could do anything; you could stop your movie and do wild shit and still be incredibly emotionally engaging. The movie also depicts sexuality in a way that I’d never seen before. Long before our culture became obsessed with sexual fluidity and where people fall on the Kinsey scale, this movie said that it was just a reality that the intimacy between friends can also be sexual, that it’s not so cut and dry. It’s about the depth of a friendship, and it was just a revelation for me. That moment when the two men kiss was like, woah, that’s right and that’s real. And the cinematography is insane and showed how you can make beautiful images with so little. It’s a simple road movie about friends, but it’s so gorgeous. Why aren’t we elevating simple stories to the level of epics? Cuarón does that. All his movies are epics, no matter how small or big they are."