"The Night of the Hunter was Charles Laughton?s only film as a director and its poor reception pretty much killed his directing career. It?s a remarkable debut and there?s no other film quite like it. It?s very reliant on imager from back in the days of D.W. Griffith and it?s strikingly designed and extremely dark. I saw it at a kiddie matinee when I was a child and I was just terrified. It has such a fairy tale atmosphere about it that it probably speaks more directly to children than it does to adults."

"This is a very important film for me, and it makes me want to make more films about Algeria, which is where my father comes from. He actually is an extra in the film, so I’ve always watched it looking for him. I saw it in Brazil at the end of the military dictatorship, when I was about nineteen, and it was an example of political cinema that was important for me at a time when I was developing a sense of political consciousness. Besides it being a great history lesson, it’s a sweeping film that’s just fantastically well made."

"I saw this with my parents as a very young child in the seventies, on television, and I never forgot it. I went back to it over the years on VHS and DVD, but this Criterion edition is quite a rediscovery. It’s an unusual VistaVision beach western with unstable and elusive racial narrative elements. It’s also the product of star power and a studio willing to go along, with reportedly messy results, but I see nothing wrong with this film. I like it a lot. Brando is wonderful in it, both as a director and as a star."

"I saw this one on the evening of its release in New York City. The advance buzz spread fears that it would ignite racial friction and incite race riots. The tension in the audience before it began was nothing I had ever experienced before in a movie house. The melting pot of moviegoers sat in stillness and silence and finally stood up and applauded the screen as the end credits rolled. We walked out of the theater transformed, more united, tolerant, and together than we were two hours before. How many films have ever been able to do that?"

"The first time I saw this film I thought there’s no way Tarantino wasn’t influenced in some way by Repo Man when he was making Pulp Fiction. This type of genre mash-up, a film that has unapologetic fun and is blissfully self-aware, is the kind of vibe I am always pulled to as a filmmaker. It's also insane that he made the film—as a student, for no money. The Criterion packaging for this one, with the comic inside, is one of my favorites. I showed it to the distributors when I was packaging A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night."

"The Sixth Sense. I don’t know if you’d call it a horror movie — the genre’s not really my cup of tea, but I heard people say “You gotta go see this movie The Sixth Sense.” I was blown away, ’cause I took it hook, line and sinker. I never saw that ending coming. I was one of those guys. M. Night had the hook in my mouth. He shot it in a way that, when I go back and look at it and knowing what you didn’t know the first time, I just think he did a masterful job with that movie."

"I’m going to put Hitchcock’s Notorious on there — the Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant film — because I think that was one of the first films that I saw as a child where I felt like, “Ok, that’s my favorite movie.” I thought it was the most romantic movie I had ever seen. It’s impeccably written, impeccably constructed, and her performance in it, I think, is really peerless actually. She’s so simple and detailed. It’s a kind of perfect spy movie. I really love that genre and I think she’s incredible in it. I actually think she’s a really under-rated actress."

"I first saw this movie on a third-generation bootleg without subtitles while I was making my first real movie, Modern Love Is Automatic. It changed the way I made that movie (there were pickup shots in Modern Love that were slated “Jeanne Dielman, take 1”) and the way I thought about movies, art, and time in general. This movie never gets enough credit for how funny and tense it is—it’s equal parts scathing satire and deconstruction/reinvention of the Hitchcockian thriller. Film financiers of the world, give all your money to twentysomething Belgian women."

"Like for many Americans, incest is a rough area for me. I just have a natural aversion to it. That being said, when I saw this film in my Bergman/Polanski seminar sophomore year, I was so taken with the Bergman way that I forgot to be freaked out by the sex between siblings. I couldn’t stop whispering the last line, “Papa spoke to me,” at everyone I came across, and I think I will start again. Bergman is the king of mood, and his actors give it all to him, free of vanity and therefore crazy beautiful."