"I saw it again recently and had to watch it all the way through to the end. It is so emblematic of an era of film that was unique to its time. There will be no more Bogart and there will be no more Bogart films, and it was for me like the quintessential Bogart film. He’s a good guy with a shadowy past, –he’s a little gruff but you absolutely cheer for him no matter what. It’s just good old fashioned filmmaking that I don’t think has aged, except for the fact that it’s so stylized and sort of melodramatic that you could never pull it off again. It’s frozen in time. It can’t be altered, so it can’t be hurt. Nobody will ever successfully make that film again."

"I’m a huge Nicole Holofcener fan. I love the details of what she explores in relationships between friends. I think money is still a fairly taboo subject, maybe the only one left, and so I thought it was such an incredible way to explore friendships and marriages and lives intertwined between families and people with different levels of money. I was just so enchanted by that movie when I saw it. And every time I’ve seen it since, I find myself relating to a different character and having a different feeling when I watch a marital argument or something. It always opens up something new. I see something different in it every time. I think she just is one of the great storytellers when it comes to just human stories and our relationships."

"Now I’m going a little more up-to-date modern. My fourth one would probably have to be Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal. I just really liked it. It was one of those movies that’s creepy but really entertaining and just different, and I really, really enjoyed that. When I saw the previews for it last year, I was like, “Man I really want to see it.” And I never got to because — we go to the movies often, but not as much. But whenever I do, I always want to go see a good movie; I want to see a movie I’d been wanting to see. So since I wasn’t able to watch it, I rented it the first day it came out, and I thought wow this movie is really, really good."

"As a piece of modern cinema, I would love to mention Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, which I thought was a brilliant, brilliant film. I think in a year that saw Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson have another science fiction film out as well, it was such a great reminder of how smaller, more thoughtful, more intense, grown-up… It’s an example of the combination of those things, in a way, a kind of more science fiction in the vein of 2001, a more cerebral, literally cerebral kind of science fiction film that was and just how beautifully performed it is. Alicia Vikander is amazing in that film. It’s a film that I’ve watched many times because I just, I don’t seem to tire of it. I think it’s excellent."

"Second film: All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey and you know, on the one hand it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack. He came through, and now he’s going to take the events that precipitated him into his heart attack, create a roman à clef around them, and build something magical, which he does. There’s a sort of strange and lovely honesty to it that, the first time I saw it when I was about 15/16 and it was on television, I found arresting, and it’s magic."

"I saw it on TV again recently and was just bowled over by it. In it's own way it's very intense: you've only basically got seven characters and they're all in same set up. There's very little break out from the library where they're all stuck. And so you really get the character development and the inter-relationships, and you really get to the heart of the kind of teenage cruelties and the way it all dissolves with their common plight. It's a very clever film. It's one of those films that creates a whole genre, not all of which I like – St Elmo's Fire, for example, was so sentimental it made me want to puke, but The Breakfast Club isn't like that. It's taut and it's very much about the teenage condition."