"I get so much pleasure from the interplay between Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in this film. My favorite thing is that long party sequence. I’m struck by the challenge of shooting something like that, of tracking all the people on-screen and letting the drama unfold slowly over an extended period of time. There’s something thrilling about the progression of Davis’s character into drunken sloppiness, as she watches her lover become more and more fascinated with this younger woman. Her emotional unraveling, and the way the camera follows Davis’s performance, shows what can happen when a great director gets to work with a great actor."

"I remember the impact Lucrecia Martel’s debut feature had on film students, critics, and fellow filmmakers. It was released on one single 35 mm print in Brazil, and that was shredded over a period of a year after playing in just about all noncommercial movie theaters around the country. I love everything about this film: the obliqueness of it, the fresh and bold take on sexuality, the use of sound, the faces and bodies. It was also quite a reference for a filmmaker like me, who like Martel believed films could be about people interacting with a certain feeling of space and time, mediated by cinema itself."

"This came out right around the time that a new wave of Mexican filmmakers were making a splash on the global cinema market. It was a very exciting time, I think. And no film exemplifies that period to me more than Alfonso Cuarón’s beautifully intimate Y tu mamá también. It felt like he really captured Mexico, and the complexities of male friendship and intimacy. And those moments in our lives that change us forever. I just saw Roma at the Savannah Film Festival and was blown away. It feels like he’s come full circle. I see an artist really contemplating life, and it’s very inspiring."

"This may not just be my favorite Dickens novel, but my favorite novel period. I read it regularly, and every time is an undimmed pleasure. More, every time it feels fresh. That is the mark of greatness. Although the comic characterization is as juicy as ever, and it’s impossible to read without laughing out loud, Dickens here gives the fullest expression—through the hero who tellingly bears, if back to front, his initials—of horror at the heartbreak, savagery and injustice of the world. It is the ultimate bildungsroman and the truest story of how a person comes to be. Not for nothing was it Freud’s favorite novel."