"Ripe with tenor and trouble. The former film aggressively male, the latter aggressively female. I’ve paired them because after viewing each I felt as though I had been placed under a spell. I’ve seen both more than twenty times, and every time I see something new. I don’t know how they did it, but have you ever watched something and felt like you were stuffed with drugs? This is Johnny Depp’s best performance, and Benicio Del Toro is a revelation. The physical embodiment of both these men . . . Bravo! And let’s not forget the always magic Giulietta Masina in one of her last collaborations with Fellini. She is absorbing and taut. Each of these films is a feat and a feast. An exercise in the grotesque."

"I saw this when I was very young. It was the first Fellini film I ever saw, and it is without a doubt my favorite Fellini film. There’s so much pathos in it. I love Nights of Cabiria, but for me this is Giulietta Masina at her best. Casting her as a clown—with her expressiveness and over-the-top facial expressions still feeling so grounded—combines realism and spectacle in one person. To me, that makes her one of the greatest of all time. When I can’t get to sleep at night and I don’t want to start a new book, I’ll put this on, and if I stay awake for the whole thing until five o’clock in the morning, I’ll be okay being tired the next day, knowing that I watched it."

"I saw this when I was very young. It was the first Fellini film I ever saw, and it is without a doubt my favorite Fellini film. There’s so much pathos in it. I love Nights of Cabiria, but for me this is Giulietta Masina at her best. Casting her as a clown—with her expressiveness and over-the-top facial expressions still feeling so grounded—combines realism and spectacle in one person. To me, that makes her one of the greatest of all time. When I can’t get to sleep at night and I don’t want to start a new book, I’ll put this on, and if I stay awake for the whole thing until five o’clock in the morning, I’ll be okay being tired the next day, knowing that I watched it."

"The next I would say is La Strada because, well, do I really have to say? I feel like it’s sort of self-explanatory. Like [laughs] Giulietta Masina, I mean every performance, but particularly the last scene in the movie, with Anthony Quinn and just being on the beach, and everything about that movie is beautiful. And there’s something always about his films that, knowing that audio was recorded post shooting the film — I’m pretty sure that’s true with that movie — just to know, in a way, if it is true, it’s just to know that there are two sort of performances happening simultaneously. You can see and hear that. And I love that idea and what skill and sort of the presence to this day that movie has. And it’s also personally really resonant because my father said after he saw that movie, it was what made him want to make movies, and when I finally saw it when I was a teenager, I understood why. So it inevitably has a resonance beyond the brilliance of the movie itself."