"A gloriously ludicrous slice of 1980s cinematic fromage. Between the infectious Queen soundtrack, eye-popping Technicolor special effects, super hot Italian space princess, outrageous production and costume design, a deranged Max von Sydow spitting eminently quotable lines, and a leading man whose principle qualification was being a Playgirl centerfold, this movie had it all. I must’ve watched it fifty times when I was a kid. It was on a near-constant loop in our living room Betamax. One of the great many things I love about being a father is sharing my beloved childhood experiences with my kids. I was so giddily excited to watch this movie with my children when they were old enough. I couldn’t wait. They turned it off halfway through. I spent the next twenty minutes trying to convince them how awesome it was. They weren’t having it. My kids have terrible taste."

"Like many of the films on this list, Arabian Nights showed me that the possibilities of working with narrative are the possibilities of working with the world. This film makes beautiful use of a documentary approach to filmmaking but within the framework of fiction. It’s filled with these faces you don’t generally see in cinema, faces that remind me of people from that region in Italy. I’m not Italian, but there’s something there that made me feel, as a Brazilian, that I was connected to these faces and these characters. It’s also a fantastic way of looking at a classic piece of literature—I am a big fan of One Thousand and One Nights, and this is an adaptation you can connect to, that doesn’t feel far away at all. There’s a sexiness and a rawness, and a sense of pulsating reality being brought to the screen on a poetic level."