"A Czech artist arrives in New York in the late 1930s and joins his cousin, a Brooklyn-born writer, and together they create comics. The world of comic books at that time was exploding, with the arrival of Superman in 1937. It would be criminal to try and explain these adventures, but Chabon is a truly great writer and fortunately he gets to do that in this book."

"Number two for me is Manhattan, Woody Allen. It’s so real-life. Again, not about any extraordinary things. It’s really true to life and true to psychology. It’s funny. It takes me to Manhattan, which I love New York City. Woody had to be on the list and, for me, he comes in at number two. Also one of the great endings in history. The score, George Gershwin … It’s amazing."

"What was the other one? The Beat That My Heart Skipped, the Jacques Audiard movie. I remember watching that at 20 or 21 or something. Actually, no, I must’ve been younger because I watched that the first time I came to New York, and Romain Duris in that — watching his performance was kind of… Like, “That is a performance which I would love to get anywhere close to.”"

"I discovered the music of Nass El Ghiwane during my travels in Morocco, and I was thrilled to finally see a restored version of this film. Apparently Martin Scorsese caught this movie on late-night public access television in New York and fell in love with it. He helped with the film’s restoration and rerelease. The footage of these guys playing and their political charge are incredible. Thank you, Marty!"

"David Lynch’s movie infuriated me when I first watched it in an empty theater during its initial run in October of 2001 in New York. But with each subsequent viewing it grows richer, more complex, and more mysterious. It surpasses Contempt as the most tragic, agonizing film about movies and Hollywood subsuming souls with promises impossible to keep. Naomi Watts as the actress who never made it has never been better."

"The wonderful, ill-fated Carole Lombard stars in this perfect, slick Depression-era romantic comedy. I like that obsolete terms such as “forgotten man”—which in this case refers to the homeless William Powell—can live on forever in the movies along with the stars who utter them. Thankfully, New York no longer has Hoovervilles, but I regret that the madcap Manhattan socialite seems to be an extinct species."

"Brian DePalma’s breakthrough thriller pays homage to several Hitchcock classics—Rear Window and Psycho, mostly—in a genuinely innovative manner, with jittery, counter-culture-ish New York wiseass humor rather than Hitch’s British wryness, an interesting set of mirror image antagonists in peculiar twins played by Margot Kidder (with a seductively odd French-Canadian accent), and nosy reporter Jennifer Salt. It has graphic shocks but also stretches of hallucinatory strangeness."