"Well, not necessarily in this order. You’ve got Raging Bull, for the reason that it’s a masterpiece of movie-making. I love it because, when you cut the boxing out, it’s about people. It’s beautifully shot. The slow-motion stuff, the music, the characters, the acting, the direction. It’s classic to me because I’ve been a boxer, and it emotionally touches me. The heart just got to me. I was sitting there with my mate watching that, and he’s a boxer and a champion boxer, and we were both crying at the end of the movie — [laughs] which sounds ridiculous, but it got to us, you know?"

"I could have easily filled this list with ten Bergman movies. (Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, The Magician, Persona, Sawdust and Tinsel, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, Through a Glass Darkly, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries—there, I did it anyway.) His filmic artistry, his seriousness of purpose, his love of actors, and, above all, his literate examinations of the human condition never fail to inspire me. I think I’ve stolen more from Bergman than any other writer. Cries and Whispers is a masterpiece. Visual storytelling, a lean narrative, exacting characterization, formal experimentation—all in the service of painful, honest humanity."

"Invisible Man has become something of an invisible book. It’s an American masterpiece and a pure, if searing, joy to read. Published in 1952, it dramatizes the doubleness of black life in America in a raucous, outrageous saga, as its unnamed narrator makes the Great Migration north to New York. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” Its brilliance is distinctly midcentury, though, and Ellison, once a Marxist firebrand, became an arch elitist, doing his book no favors with his disdain for popular struggles around race and inequality. But the vitality of Invisible Man is undiminished, and its most caustic insights into American life still painfully relevant."

"Agnès Varda’s New Wave masterpiece about a famous singer/fashion model who abandons her blond wig and rediscovers her identity on the streets of Paris is jam-packed with vivid detail, an expressive graphic style, and an eye for urban chaos, and is at least as engaging and inventive as Breathless and The 400 Blows. While waiting for this film to enter its rightful place in the canon of great movies, buy it now and enjoy its distinctly up-to-date sensibility. More than forty years after it was made, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a perfect movie for our times, digging beneath the surface of fashion and celebrity culture."