"Antonioni’s best film. This movie puts me into such a pleasurable deep funk. Profound, chic, visual existentialism has always been up my alley. Every image is boldly striking—from the hustle and bustle of the stock market (as timely as today’s headlines) to the urban architectural landscapes to the lovers Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. The last are especially easy on the eyes. This movie caters to the intellectual fantasy in many of us. If you are a professional philosopher or lay thinker (like myself) who likes to contemplate the nature of “reality,” the last ten minutes will totally blow your circuits. This is one very cool movie. Richard Peña’s commentary has so much information, minute for minute, you wonder how the guy keeps it all in his head."

"Last of the Mohicans was like my childhood favorite. I love that movie. The soundtrack to that is probably one of my favorite in the world. My favorite movie is probably the life of Daniel Day-Lewis. If you watched Gangs of New York, it sucked, but then you see him as Bill the Butcher, it’s unbelievable. You really want to say Gangs of New York because he’s so amazing, but then you want to say There Will Be Blood. I mean, really, he’s so amazing. My Left Foot, Last of the Mohicans; the guy is just a freak of nature. He’s like a national treasure. That’s what he should be considered. Mindblowing, absolutely mindblowing. I can’t wait to see him play Lincoln. Anything Daniel Day-Lewis is in, that’s pretty much my favorite movie."

"Black Moon is a quintessential “surreal” film. What interests me is that so many films that we would label surreal were made in the sixties and seventies, decades (and many art movements) after surrealism’s inception. By the time so many of these surreal films were being made, the prevalent trend in art was toward conceptualism and minimalism, approaches aimed at stripping away the non sequitur . . . which is, in essence, the guiding principle at work in Black Moon. What is also interesting to me is the tenor of most of these films. While Zéro de conduit captures a certain joie de vivre and sense of humor, which, I feel, is indicative of the early surrealists, the nature of many later surreal films generally seems much darker—more Max Ernst than, say, Magritte."

"I can’t wait to see this new release! I have such incredible memories of watching this (probably just on a VHS borrowed from the library) and gushing over it with my mom and sister. All that gorgeousness, safe harbor from stupid rules, humor, light and landscape, and Kiri Te Kanawa blasting your heart out—such a welcome alternative for a young teenager into year six of the Reagan era. I am such a fan of how E. M. Forster’s novel engenders hope and the promise of a sane and healthy relationship between humans, love, and nature and themselves. This film is so fun, and feels like everything is coming from such a knowing, good, and caring place. It supports you! Be true to yourself, do the right thing!"

"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."

"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."

"Is there a greater, more suggestive and bittersweet movie title than All That Heaven Allows? (Well, yes, there is, Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . , but that’s another story and another great Criterion disc.) Sirk dug beneath the surface of idyllic American small-town life in the 1950s, and the surface has never been more beautiful than in this Technicolor nightmare of conformity and the repressive nature of community and family life. It’s Freud vs. Walden, as pettiness, jealousy, and repression pair off against a bohemian vision of rural tranquility. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose brilliant essay on Sirk is included as an extra, remade the movie as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and it was also the model for Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven and Sanaa Hamri’s not-too-shabby Something New."

"As counterweight to the weird and eerie elements in many of the books I have selected I propose the sweet and kind Summer Book. Tove Jansson’s fictionalized memoir about the summers she spent as a girl with her grandmother on a tiny island in the archipelago off Finland’s south coast is a wonderful ode to the curiosity of childhood and the wisdom of old age. In a precise, lyrical language that never gives in to easy sentiments Jansson allows us to take part in the summer days with the girl and the grandmother as one is discovering nature for the first time and the other is contemplating its vulnerability. It is sunshine in the shape of a book — for the shadowy part of Jansson’s oeuvre one must look to her children stories about the Moomins."

"This slim novel is one of the most intriguing works of literature I have come upon in a long while. Part mystery, part metaphysical journey, part fairy tale, part adult love story, it brought me to a state of the most welcome strangeness, similar to the one I sought out as a young reader of books that challenged how we perceive reality and reconstruct it in text. In the narrative’s mysterious, slow burn of a chase, a woman who has left her husband is tracked down in The Taiga, a territory where the laws of nature are as much out of joint as the rules of its isolated human society. In its uneasy atmosphere there are echoes from Tarkovsky's film Stalker as well as from golden age private eye novels."