"I love Stanley Kubrick so much that the mere mention of his name is enough to make me smile involuntarily. This is not my favorite Kubrick film, but it’s terrific. Peter Sellers. The war room. The Coke machine. The way each plot element triggers the next like falling dominoes. It’s a perfect machine. There are so many funny and absurd lines: “Now look, Col. Bat Guano, if that really is your name” and “Of course it’s a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn’t friendly, you probably wouldn’t have even got it.” As always, I love Kubrick’s bureaucratic, non-psychological language. His persistent return to flat, transactional dialogue provides the perfect banal foil to his wilder, more imaginative moments."

"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman. It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and you get to the end…well, a tragic ending kind of goes with the tragedy of finishing a book."

"Okay, I will pick a film with Bowie in it. [laughs] I’m going to say The Last Temptation of Christ, where he plays Pilate. All the Romans are English, and all the Jews are American. [laughs] I think it’s just a perfect piece of filmmaking. It’s brave and it’s imaginative and it’s about the most kind of profound things, and yet it’s very human. And the music — Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack is incredible. Again, every time I watch it… it’s the same with a lot of Scorsese’s films — as soon as you turn the channel and come across one, no matter how many times you’ve seen it, you sort of can’t stop watching it, because he’s a master story teller. That’s my five for today."

"The seemingly precious whimsy of Wes Anderson’s style masks a sensibility that is at once delicate and magnificently imaginative. The Royal Tenenbaums has been described as an adaptation of a great novel that doesn’t exist, and it is set in an upper Upper West Side that also doesn’t exist. Anderson literally creates a world of his own to explore the most primal emotions and family dynamics. There is so much to savor—the sweat suits, the enchanting music, Gene Hackman on a tricycle—and the DVD is also a world of its own, as beautifully packaged as, well, a Wes Anderson film, with Kent Jones’s lucid manifesto defining Anderson’s particular brand of genius, and a great gallery of production design drawings."