"I always come back to this idea of chaotic femininity or chaotic femme. It’s a discourse I have with some of my nerdier friends, like a standard for representations of women that we gravitate to and are driven crazy by. What Assayas does in this film, with the layers of fiction and reality, and representation of representations of representations, is similar to Mulholland Dr.: he interrogates this idea of the actress and the very idea of a character, and leaves you with a queasy feeling about what it all adds up to. What I love about this, particularly as embodied in Juliette Binoche’s performance, is the idea of a woman who is resigned to a downfall and is just fascinated to see how it all plays out. What is this thing that leads women with stable socioeconomic circumstances and certain amounts of privilege (in this case, fame and fortune) to self-destruct? It’s an endlessly fascinating question to me, and I love the way this film explores it. I also immensely enjoy seeing American stars like Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz in this complicated, dark, serpentine French film. Those are some of my favorite performances by each of the three women. I love films about actresses; they always hit me right where it hurts."

"It’s the first movie I saw when I was a kid, and it’s also my first memory of my life. It’s the first thing I remember. I was three years old — I know that because it was 1978. The first thing I remember in my life is the shot of Christopher Reeve wearing the Superman clothes and flying. That image provoked such an impact on me that from that moment on, I wanted to be Superman. And then as I grew up, I wanted to be the guy who made Superman possible. So I found out that there were these guys called actors and I wanted to be one. I was obsessed with movies when I was a kid. That movie created such an impact on me, and when I watch it again nowadays, I still believe it’s a masterpiece. It established the superhero genre on a level that, I think nowadays there’s not any movie that has it better than that for me, in the genre. The reality of the special effects, the chemistry between Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder is still there. The way Richard Donner recreates Smallville… It’s an endless film to me. It’s an amazing film, especially nowadays."

"As someone who’s really passionate about what he does, I have a lot of opinions about documentary films. A lot of documentary filmmakers don’t really think about their films cinematically, and some documentaries almost seem like they were just copy-and-pasted like Microsoft Word documents. I’ve always loved how Errol Morris takes a wrecking ball to those conventions. His films are constantly exploring the idea of what a documentary is. His films tweak and twist reality, and they don’t just try to serve the audience digested ideas on a platter. If I had to pick a favorite, it’s his transcendent 1988 classic The Thin Blue Line, which recounts a murder case and then riffs and re-riffs on it like a Bach fugue. It was the first film to really use re-creation and reeneactment scenes in a new and highly cinematic way, both to explore a case and to challenge a viewer’s own bias and subjectivity. Nowadays, its approach and editing style loom over every one of these multipart true crime series and podcasts. The Thin Blue Line is almost like the influential band that’s been ripped off so often that new converts may not realize just how significant it is."

"A great, great movie that was unjustly robbed of a lot of the recognition it would have gotten, but it came out in the year of amazing other movies, you know, like Apocalypse Now and a lot of other great stuff. To this date it is the most accurate portrayal of theater folk and what it’s like to produce and be part of theater. As a theater geek all my life, I was hoping that Smash would be like that, and boy it’s not. All That Jazz nailed it, just in terms of the reality of it. But again, it would go off into those fantasies that still totally worked, and worked as incredible dance numbers, but you know, were clearly fantasy numbers inside one of the most realistic portrayals of that subculture that had never been put on screen. It’s f—ing perfect. It’s just f—ing perfect. It’s great because it’s funny, it’s cynical about the theater but also clearly loves the subject matter. You know, I grew up backstage — my parents were actors — and it just captures that world absolutely incredibly accurately. Plus, it’s just a really ballsy, artistic movie from Bob Fosse in that it incorporates a lot of strange stuff, but all of it works."

"Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece was an international critical and financial success, winning four Oscars. And that was in its truncated, just-over-three-hour version. Included in this set is Bergman’s full version, made for Swedish television. Presented in four parts, it comes in at over five hours, nearly twice as long as the theatrical cut. It’s truly a marvel to behold, intricately detailing every aspect of the lives of the Ekdahl family in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden. As it brilliantly charts a span of several years through the eyes of children, the film is equally detailed with its adult characters’ points of view. Equal parts joyous and tragic. A marvelous and loving tribute to Bergman’s life in the theater. Full of magical realism and stark, painful reality. A meditation on death and a celebration of life. Dickensian in nature (Dickens is said to have been a major influence on Bergman for this film). Truly unlike anything else he ever did. It recalls the great epics of David Lean, which were massive in scope while also being concerned with intimate details of the human condition and its fragility. A masterwork in either version. Watch them both and never be bored for a moment."

"It’s so epic and so well-acted, it’s got a literary lineage, and it’s just amazing. I was a fan of all the music, and it’s so well-used in the picture. I was always intrigued and fascinated by the Vietnam war and this made me feel like I was there. I was surprised by so many things about the reality of war. When Martin Sheen’s character is going up the river and he goes to this one place where they’re blowing up a bridge everyday and he says, “Where’s your CO,” and he says, “Ain’t you him?” and I was just like, “Oh shit.” And the other thing that still stays with me today, the way the character acted — the helicopter pilot that’s going down — he says “Mayday Mayday, we’re going down.” He doesn’t overdo it; he gives information that’s necessary for other people to hear, and so for me that was a big acting lesson. I didn’t know it at the time. Any other actor — he may have been a real pilot — any other actor would have chewed that up, screaming, “Mayday,” but a real pilot has to convey information to the tower. He goes, “I’m in trouble, I’m in trouble,” and that’s it."

"Close Up by Abbas Kiarostami. The way that that film blends fiction and reality, it is a north star for me. He made a movie about a contemporary Iranian filmmaker named Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and he read an article in the paper about a person who went around pretending to be this filmmaker in order to scam a family out of money and resources. And he went and cast the guy who was going around pretending to be Makhmalbaf, and he cast the real family that he scammed. And he recreated each scenario as if it was a script. He used real life as a script, and you’re watching the real players re-enact something that happened recently in their life, and the result is magical. The result is something that only film can give you. It makes you question your own self. It makes you question, what is a personality? It makes you question empathy. Because you start to actually see that this guy is actually a great actor, the main guy. And then you have one of the most complicated moments in all movies, when Makhmalbaf himself picks up the guy from the prison and rides on a motorcycle through Tehran. Masterpiece"

"Kristin Hersh is no ordinary musician, and her mind is unlike any other. In her memoir, Paradoxical Undressing, she captures what it’s like to be young and starting out, but this is a grazed reality, the top layer of skin stripped clean away. The book is based on a diary she kept when she was 18, which is, as she says, “the age when no one takes care of you”. It was a year when everything happened. She moved her band, Throwing Muses, from Providence, Rhode Island, to Boston. She was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, then bipolar. She was offered her first recording contract, with 4AD. She discovered she was pregnant. And she became unlikely friends with faded Hollywood movie star, Betty Hutton. “Betty sings about starlight and champagne,” Hersh writes. “I sing about dead rabbits and blow jobs.” Though Hutton was unpredictable and fragile (“Time is like a hurricane to her – a big, fast mess, sweeping her away”) she was also full of generosity, compassion and advice. “You have to leave things out to tell a story,” she once told Hersh. And Hersh listened. This female Kurt Cobain – he was a fan of her work – has forged her own brave path, often against enormous odds. And she writes better sentences than most writers do."

"I love Ghost Box. In a similar way to how British psych from the '60s looked back to a whimsical past and kids' fiction from the Victorian era, Ghost Box look back to a more modern past – specifically the '60s and '70s, which is when I grew up. It's an analogue sound that seems to evoke brutalist architecture, new towns and the like. You can imagine Ghost Box soundtracking a film about a new town built on a burial site. Jim [Jupp] and Julian [House, Ghost Box co-founder] come from Caldicot, which is a really spooky part of Wales. Lots of weird gothic architecture and a lot of weird local folklore and superstition. This record by the Belbury Poly [Jupp] presents someone's version of the past, a vision that's both real and ephemeral. It harks back to a time that wasn't obviously psychedelic but it's not obviously retro. Without being too rose-tinted specs about this record, it has a slight 'warm blanket' effect, while still being a little uncomfortable, if that makes sense. It's possibly a weird record for me to pick in a list of psychedelic records but it definitely does that thing of successfully imagining an alternate reality. I can imagine walking around this place."