"I love this drama by Nicholas Ray, shot in CinemaScope. James Mason plays a professor and family man who has a troubled relationship with over-the-counter drugs. Bigger Than Life is a modern take on U.S. society in the 1950s that was unusual at a time when Hollywood and television were invested in depicting picture-perfect nuclear families. The film is both disturbing and fascinating."

"The book I have read the most times. I love the decadent melancholy of it. I also love the delicate relationship between Gatsby and his unrequited love, Daisy. My favorite sentence from the book is when Daisy says, ‘What will we do with ourselves this afternoon and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’ Now that is restlessness and privilege if I ever heard it!"

"This is a continuing theme, because it’s the same lead actor [Humphrey Bogart]. For me, this is the best love story ever, ever, ever shot. You could make an exciting, complicated, hot, sexy relationship between a pot-bellied alcoholic and a dried up, skinny spinster… Well, what it really tells you about is Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, and what f—ing monsters they were."

"“I like Tim Burton, but this is one of his that gets me every time. It’s a movie about the relationship between fathers and sons and about storytelling, and those are two things that I have particular interest in. It makes me cry like a little girl every time I see it. It has three denouements in it – after every one I’ve got tears on my face.”"

"In the same way This Is Spinal Tap won me over with its commitment to comedy, this film nailed the complexities of a relationship. It starkly showed couples who were on autopilot—shut down and unreachable. And Ang Lee holds fast to the point of view of children, who see their flawed elders and try to organize their situation in the best way they can."

"The ending takes a concern at the heart of cinema—the relationship between the real world and the director impulse—and turns it into a self-aware narrative climax, which opens the iris of the film dramatically. This is moving, strange, captivating stuff. Like an old friend once told me, in order for an organism to grow, it must be aware that it is alive."