"These are all films vying for my favorite film. The thing I love about all the films I chose for the list is that they still feel extraordinarily fresh, as if they were made yesterday. There’s a timeless quality to them and a vibrancy and an energy to all of them, but particularly A Hard Day’s Night really struck me, being a huge fan of rock and roll. It’s a film that really defies any sort of — it’s difficult to put it into a specific genre — it’s a rock and roll film, right? It’s also sort of like a documentary of the early years of Beatlemania, and it’s also comedically like a Marx Brothers film. I just love the combination of all of those things, which give it an intense vibrancy and charm. Also these are five films that I watch at least once a year. I always come back to them and the Criterion collection just restored [Hard Day’s Night]. It was a marvel to see it restored and how beautiful a movie it is."

"To look at Mick Jagger’s creative output today, working hard to suggest the dynamism of his early career, you may wonder what it is he is straining to return to. This film offers an answer. Rock and roll, particularly British rock of the late sixties and early seventies, featured pioneering, Dionysian front men who lured their fans, male and female, into a bacchanal of sex, drugs, and blistering music. Those gatherings were often combustible. In this case, tragic. The remarkable Maysles brothers and Ms. Zwerin fashion a kind of cinematic, pop Warren Commission of the Altamont Speedway concert/crime scene. You don’t need drugs to get high watching the Stones at their peak. The band, and especially Jagger, are a drug."

"I guess I’d have to say This Is Spinal Tap. I don’t know that many movies made me laugh as hard as that did — the first few times I saw it, anyway. I haven’t seen it in a while, but I know that at some point I will watch it again and laugh anew at it. That movie is just so brilliant. It captures something from a period in rock and roll that, even though I wasn’t there, it just feels so right. It feels like, “Oh, yeah, this is based on something real.” That time in rock and roll, and these guys are not that far off from real rock and rollers of a certain band. And it’s just brilliant. I mean, it’s just so well done, and just so funny. I mean, they were such an amazing team: Michael McKean, and then Rob Reiner directing, and Christopher Guest. You know, it’s a masterpiece, a comedy masterpiece."

"The British Invasion of the sixties fascinates me, as do the glitter rock and prog rock movements that followed. A Hard Day’s Night is my all-time favorite film, and the music made between 1964 and 1974 has remained my favorite. Most of that music is filled with power, liberation, and joy. But right in the middle of that ten-year period was this terrible event that seems to body-slam the “peace and love” vibe that preceded it. The Rolling Stones had recently lost founding member and icon Brian Jones and were moving on. Some genius decides to hire Hells Angels (with beer) for security at their concert at the Altamont Speedway, which results in the stabbing death of a concertgoer. It’s amazing that these events all come together in this eerie and compelling document. This film details the exact moment of “the end of an era.” Chilling."