"Todd Haynes’s gorgeous 1995 metaphor for the AIDS crisis, Safe, is no less timely today. Julianne Moore turns in an amazingly subtle performance as a rich white lady struggling with a mysterious autoimmune disease who retreats to a wellness community. Her character predates all the gluten free, anti-vaxxer, yoga-obsessed, Goop-reading, Lyme-diseased ladies of today and shows what empty, sad, colorless lives their “authentic selves” are left to lead . . . Namaste, motherfuckers. While Safe is all muted colors, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the in-your-face brash vision of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. His plastic-surgery-victim women are camera-ready for a 2016 The First Wives of Beverly Hills reality show. I love this movie’s intoxicating mix of humor and horror."

"Todd Haynes’s gorgeous 1995 metaphor for the AIDS crisis, Safe, is no less timely today. Julianne Moore turns in an amazingly subtle performance as a rich white lady struggling with a mysterious autoimmune disease who retreats to a wellness community. Her character predates all the gluten free, anti-vaxxer, yoga-obsessed, Goop-reading, Lyme-diseased ladies of today and shows what empty, sad, colorless lives their “authentic selves” are left to lead . . . Namaste, motherfuckers. While Safe is all muted colors, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the in-your-face brash vision of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. His plastic-surgery-victim women are camera-ready for a 2016 The First Wives of Beverly Hills reality show. I love this movie’s intoxicating mix of humor and horror."

"Anchored by Gena Rowland’s titanic performance, the Cassavetes opus was a watershed film for me. When her character waits for her kids at the bus stop I started crying and couldn’t stop. One of the movies’ greatest portrayals of the complexities of being female and interesting in a man’s world. Jeanne Dielman is the ultimate punk-rock statement in cinema. It’s feminist, female, utterly subversive—and clocking in at three hours and twenty-one minutes, it plants a flag of absolute confidence. It is a masterpiece of the first order, every shot purposeful, every moment freighted with intent. Akerman was twenty-five when she made the film, and she redefined our limited notions of a cinematic wunderkind. If anyone wants to argue with me about this, I’m happy to rumble."

"Anchored by Gena Rowland’s titanic performance, the Cassavetes opus was a watershed film for me. When her character waits for her kids at the bus stop I started crying and couldn’t stop. One of the movies’ greatest portrayals of the complexities of being female and interesting in a man’s world. Jeanne Dielman is the ultimate punk-rock statement in cinema. It’s feminist, female, utterly subversive—and clocking in at three hours and twenty-one minutes, it plants a flag of absolute confidence. It is a masterpiece of the first order, every shot purposeful, every moment freighted with intent. Akerman was twenty-five when she made the film, and she redefined our limited notions of a cinematic wunderkind. If anyone wants to argue with me about this, I’m happy to rumble."

"It’s another one of those movies that just feels so real. You watch those scenes and you’ve got tanks and armies, you know. It’s the first film I saw, as far as docudrama film style — you know, hand-held, very real, in the streets, in the world. And if I’m not mistaken, he only made a couple of films; the filmmaker made it and then he disappeared. He stopped making [fiction] movies. He made one with Marlon Brando and then that was kind of it. But the fact that he pulled off this movie — it’s a masterpiece. I remember watching the movie and feeling like it was a documentary, it felt so real. It’s so amazing. The performances of the actors, everything — it’s mind-blowing when you watch it."

"This is generally known as Bergman’s most personal film, a complete masterpiece and triumphant study of childhood and the human condition, but I came to it by accident. This is a bit embarrassing, but I was about fifteen and I thought it was the movie adaptation of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. To a highly untrained teenager’s eye, there are just enough similarities—like messed-up bourgeois family dynamics as seen through the prism of siblings—that I must have thought, “Well, I guess the whole thing just takes place over Christmas now. And they changed the names. And everyone’s Swedish.” Best cinematic mix-up of my life. Even better than that time in college when I drunkenly watched the second disc of Magnolia first and thought it made total sense."