"I moved to Brooklyn from Panama when I was twelve going on thirteen. I saw Do the Right Thing on VHS. No film has struck more of a chord with me on the subject of race in America. It’s funny and saturated and larger than life. There’s a danger lurking early on. The film’s explosive opening signals that something big will happen. When that big arrives, it’s a knife in the middle of your chest."

"This film is my church. It’s the first Gus Van Sant film I saw, and I was blown away. He zeroed in on a subculture that I thought only I knew about. MOPI is a very ahead-of-its-time film, and I felt privileged to be able to participate with even a small commentary on the Criterion release. The film has never been more gorgeous than it is on the Criterion release"

"I first saw this film when I started seeking out movies directed by women. This one stood out. There’s something so believable about that lead character—she’s a teenager I can understand. I loved her anger and her passion, and I was touched by her relationship with her mother. And I find Michael Fassbender’s performance so creepy in the midst of all this mundaneness, which Andrea Arnold depicts in such a raw and powerful way."

"Angels inhabit the earth and long to be human because the pain and love of mortality is beautiful. Wim Wenders mixes color with black and white, dialogue with voice-over, aerial with handheld cinematography, and the historical with the magical in this intimate, poetic vision of ordinary life. This film came out when I was in college and was so new and fresh that many of us saw it on a weekly basis."

"Typically, I saw La Jetée, my first Chris Marker, in film school. To this day, I’ll hold that no other film is as great a contemplation of cinema in a way—and this is the important part—that is immediately accessible to anyone and everyone, not just students of semiotics or, for that matter, kids in film school. Sans Soleil is, of course, another matter altogether, which is what makes their Criterion pairing so auspicious."

"I really love all of Bresson’s movies, but I’m picking this one because it was the first one I saw by him and one of the first VHS tapes I ever bought. I still own that tape. There’s this beautiful, tender, awkward quality to all of Bresson’s movies that I really love. You feel like the actors might forget their lines at any moment . . . but then they don’t, and it just feels so transcendently real . . ."

"And then, I love I Heart Huckabees. I think that might be my favorite comedy. And I know it’s weird, because every time I tell people that, they’re like, “Oh, I’ll have to see it.” And I say, “You know, you might not like it,” because it’s just so weird. But I loved it. I was obsessed with it when I first saw it; I watched it four times in one week."