"The first volume in the Neapolitan quartet, this one changes in the mind’s eye if you’re pulled, as I am, helplessly through the subsequent books, with its primal scenes from early childhood deepening throughout. Is there a better portrait of friendship in literature than the story of Elena Greco, the narrator, and her brilliant friend, Lila Cerullo? Elena escapes the old neighborhood, and the poverty of postwar Naples, through education, but Lila remains the incandescent figure. The tormented power of their relationship never flags, through “The Story of a New Name,” “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” and the devastating “The Story of a Lost Child.” I hear the TV series is good. The books are a universe."

"I’d put The Fellowship of the Ring in there. I just think Peter Jackson did a fantastic job with the movie, and I loved those books. It’s one of those things where, reading the books, and getting so excited about them, and just praying that the movie did it justice. And it totally did, to me. Plus, the relationship between Frodo and Sam, and Gollum, and all of that. I loved it. I’m also a huge fan of The Chronicles of Narnia, and I had the opposite experience with that, where it just didn’t click like it did with The Lord of the Rings. So I just loved what Peter Jackson did with that."

"The other one in the comedy genre is an all-time classic, Coming to America. Like Harlem Nights, Coming to America, the rawness of it, Eddie and Arsenio’s relationship, just all the different characters Eddie was able to play and pull off — not a shabby job, Arsenio played a lot of characters himself — but the brilliance of Eddie Murphy. If they gave Oscars for comedies back then, that would have been the top of the list. You know, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor turned in some incredible ones, too, but I tend to love what Coming to America was all about. Just the fact that it was New York, and how it started and where it went."

"As the son of an Episcopal priest, I have a semi-complex relationship with religion. I’ve remained fairly agnostic throughout most of my life, but I admire the seed of the Christian myth—that there can exist in the world a love that gives and asks nothing in return. No movie crystallizes this idea better than Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, which rips my heart out every time I watch it. The Christian ideal exists in humanity fleetingly, but by casting a donkey as his Christ surrogate, Bresson evokes the saintly disposition to which we should all aspire as effectively as (if not more so than) Roberto Rossellini does in The Flowers of St. Francis."

"I discovered Fassbinder senior year of college, and I couldn’t believe it. Both of these films are perfect to me. Ali tells a grotesque yet delicate love story that, to my dummy liberal arts mind, was an analogy for the challenges of a gay relationship in the repressed Germany of the 1970s (at least that’s what I said in my thesis). Maria Braun is the tragic, triumphant story of a woman who does what she must to get by, but loses herself in the process. They both make you wanna dress up and smoke opium and fuck people you meet late at night in a bodega, even if you’re not into that."

"I discovered Fassbinder senior year of college, and I couldn’t believe it. Both of these films are perfect to me. Ali tells a grotesque yet delicate love story that, to my dummy liberal arts mind, was an analogy for the challenges of a gay relationship in the repressed Germany of the 1970s (at least that’s what I said in my thesis). Maria Braun is the tragic, triumphant story of a woman who does what she must to get by, but loses herself in the process. They both make you wanna dress up and smoke opium and fuck people you meet late at night in a bodega, even if you’re not into that."