"I had the legendary film critic Andrew Sarris as a professor during his later years. At the time, he’d gab about the auteur theory (it was his theory, you know?) and talk about Hitchcock, Wilder, and Ford. But when pressed by his sycophantic students (myself included), he’d actually declare a 1955 Max Ophuls movie “the greatest movie ever made.” It was the first time I had ever heard of Lola Montès, so I immediately blind-bought the Criterion laser disc. I eventually graduated to the Blu-ray, which I’ve now seen countless times. Lola Montès is a beautiful, virtuoso piece of cinema. It’s an old-fashioned woman’s picture. It’s a study of loneliness. It’s structurally daring and technically masterful. It’s also really fun. It’ll make you want to devour every Ophuls movie you can get your hands on. The Criterion disc also features a really lovely documentary on Ophuls, made by his filmmaker son Marcel (I find this extra touching as my father is a filmmaker too.) After watching Lola Montès, New Yorkers can check out the grave of the real-life Lola Montès in Green-Wood Cemetery, an unlikely burial place for this nineteenth-century globetrotter."

"There's A Riot Goin' On is an abstract, nihilistic, urban death funk record. Sly documents the times better than anybody – 1971: the whole civil rights movement has been crushed by the murders of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and the whole American state dismantled the Black Panther party. Sly Stone documents the dread and the suffocation of those times. His music before that was transcendent and joyous with stuff like 'Everyday People', which was basically life-affirming music. Then from about 1969, '70, he starts to become darker with these new funk sounds. Even the hit single from the record, 'Family Affair', is dark. He would have never written that four years prior. It was like the utopian idealism of the '60s had gone and America was almost at war with itself. But Sly never made this a political record – his aim was to put the American flag on the cover with no writing on it. The lyrics were internalised, it was kind of like a closed-off, looking-inward record. There's no reverb on this record and it's completely dry. There's no real joy in the record."

"I always defend this movie. Some people hate it. I love it, although I am not in a rush to watch the first half again… There is a scene near the end of the film where it is just Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel lounging around their apartment. One of those lazy days you have with a partner. They were a real life couple and that chemistry shoots through to the film. You can tell they are madly in love. I always break into tears at this moment. It puts everything you’ve seen prior into heartbreaking context. The film is a tragedy told in reverse. I think it’s brilliant because by the design of its structure, it makes you think about the tragedy more than if you were just experiencing it in chronological order. Instead of getting to the end of the film and rooting for our protagonist to bash this guys head in, we get to the end of the film and think about how pointless all that pain and violence was and how heartbreaking it is that the violence destroyed this pure love."