"Gregory Nava’s film was shown at a Friday school assembly at the private Quaker school I attended from kindergarten to twelfth grade. It was International Day or some special Friday event, and we had the whole morning blocked off. I remember being floored by the rough-hewn portrayal of migrants who were my age, crawling through sewer tunnels as if they were in a Victor Hugo novel. In my twenties, I would go on to chronicle the journeys of Latin American and Caribbean migrants who crossed into the United States without documents. I would ride in the backs of trucks with them, interview them at U.S. Border Patrol processing stations, track their families, who had paid coyotes thousands of dollars. As a thirtysomething mother living in Houston, our Guatemalan babysitter borrowed $1,800 because her son was being held in a safe house in Northern Mexico. After his release, he was picked up by Border Patrol and held at a processing center in Houston. An editorial friend of mine from the Houston Chronicle visited him there and wrote about his journey. He was eventually released and was reunited with his mother. The impact of this movie cannot be understated. I was lucky enough to meet Gregory when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter covering the lack of diversity in Hollywood, and I remain a fan of his work."

"Why, of all the Godards? Well, in part because we all know already that Breathless is one of the most important debuts in the history of cinema, that Band of Outsiders is one hell of a good time, and so on and so forth. And I might have pled the case for another favorite of mine, Alphaville. But, besides all its widescreen majesty, Contempt offers a unique hook for me. From McGilligan’s Lang biography: “At one point Michel Piccoli’s character remarks to Lang how much he and his wife enjoyed watching Rancho Notorious, with Marlene Dietrich, on the television one night. The director forthrightly replies that he himself prefers M. This was also Godard’s joke on himself. Not only did the Cahiers du cinéma crowd champion his Hollywood films above the Berlin ones, but Godard had actually written that M was ‘the least good film of Lang’s.’ ” . . . The world of cinema will forever be indebted to Godard for this Fritz Lang swan song. One elegiac image—just a few moments really, sans dialogue—speaks volumes: The director is seen lighting up a cigarette after others have exited the scene; the camera tracks beside the elder statesman of film as he walks slowly along a street alone, apparently lost in thought. Godard’s camera watches him contemplatively while, in the background, George Delerue’s eloquent score rises on a gorgeous note."

"My second favorite film is probably even more intellectually challenging than Wong Kar-Wai; it’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I f***ing love that movie! I have two children; I’ve probably seen this movie, with each child, about 50 times each. And that’s no exaggeration. There’s nothing I don’t know about this movie. I once went to a meeting with an executive in Hollywood, and they asked me what I wanted to do. I said, ‘I’d love to do a remake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang‘ — I was just making it up — ‘and I’d call it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Boom,’ and he said that’s a great title! [Laughs] I was only kidding. But that’s a movie I really love. In the UK at Christmastime, the girls would get The Sound of Music and the boys would get Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was that kind of thing, where every Christmas you would see it. So when I had kids, of course I put it on for my son and then he became obsessed with it. It’s the kind of movie where you never really get to the end; it’s so long, and the kids can only really wait so long. But the beginning of the film is like 20 minutes long, before anything even happens. It’s just the story of the car. It’s fantastic!"