"It would probably be a Woody Allen movie, and I don’t know whether it would be Manhattan, or Annie Hall, or Broadway Danny Rose. Those are my three favorites, but it’s kind of hard to pick a favorite among those. I don’t know. It’s hard. I mean, they’re all three so good. I don’t know. Maybe Annie Hall is my favorite. It’s one of the most lauded certainly. But then you’ve got Manhattan, and the romance of New York City, and you have that obviously in Annie Hall, to a certain extent. Broadway Danny Rose is less often mentioned, I find, but still really amazing with him (Allen) and Mia Farrow. He’s such a character, and Broadway Danny Rose represents all these, you know, sort of loser acts in a way. But it’s such a sweetness to it that I love, and it’s just like all of his – I like all of those movies certainly. So well shot, in beautiful black and white. "

"It’s hard to believe a movie like this was once considered not only culturally impactful but mainstream. If The Last Picture Show could even get made today, I’m sure it would make a hundred dollars at art houses in New York and Los Angeles before going to Netflix in a month. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, not far from the setting of The Last Picture Show. Though I lived there in the seventies and early eighties and not the early fifties . . . though my town was in color and not black-and-white . . . Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry evoke the way life felt for me. I knew some Sam the Lions, was closely related to some of them. As the movie suggests, they are now extinct. Every element of this film succeeds, and yet it is bigger than the sum of its parts. A profound film about the vanishing of character in America."

"This one isn’t a high school movie, but more a college-age movie. It’s called Mazes and Monsters and it stars Tom Hanks. It’s about the dangers of role-playing games, and if you play these role-playing games, you’ll lose touch with reality. Tom Hanks is a kid who gets too into their version of Dungeons and Dragons, which they call Mazes and Monsters. He loses touch with reality and thinks he really is on the quest, and disappears into New York City. His friends have to try and find him. It’s definitely worth checking out if you can find it. It might be one of those movies that just disappeared. I think it was a made-for-TV movie, but it’s always affected me. I saw it when I was a kid on the Saturday afternoon matinee movie, and it just has this ending that is so bleak that I’ll never forget."

"To prove that I mean it when I say “four-way tie,” I’ll start with the last one, Kicking and Screaming, a movie I can recite from start to finish. You know, in case you’re ever in the mood for an hour-long party trick. Actually, I wrote an essay about my love for it for the New York Observer when the Criterion Collection released the DVD and raced to fill out the crossword puzzle like a regular dork. Two words: Broken glass. Meanwhile, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan is a seminal movie for me and a whole bunch of other people of my generation. Speaking of party tricks, evoking empathy for Upper East Side WASPs is a good one. Same with Barcelona. The reason these four are grouped together is because of their supreme ability to capture the cadence of youth and young adulthood. They display floundering without being floundering. This is the hardest thing to achieve, in any format, and Linklater makes it look easy."

"To prove that I mean it when I say “four-way tie,” I’ll start with the last one, Kicking and Screaming, a movie I can recite from start to finish. You know, in case you’re ever in the mood for an hour-long party trick. Actually, I wrote an essay about my love for it for the New York Observer when the Criterion Collection released the DVD and raced to fill out the crossword puzzle like a regular dork. Two words: Broken glass. Meanwhile, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan is a seminal movie for me and a whole bunch of other people of my generation. Speaking of party tricks, evoking empathy for Upper East Side WASPs is a good one. Same with Barcelona. The reason these four are grouped together is because of their supreme ability to capture the cadence of youth and young adulthood. They display floundering without being floundering. This is the hardest thing to achieve, in any format, and Linklater makes it look easy."