"I think probably Seven Samurai, by Kurosawa. I think I saw that when I was about 15 or 16 in the cinema. It’s such a big old chunk of a film, and it’s always a treat to sit down with that movie. It’s so perfectly framed, and perfectly judged; it’s basically the blueprint for most action cinema — expect that it’s much more intelligent than most action cinema. There’s characters in it that hardly only get a couple of lines, but you feel that they’re totally fleshed out. The massive battle scene at the end, which should be completely confusing, is instead just completely clear — you never worry about where you are, you never don’t understand what their plan is — and I think that’s something that you rarely see in cinema now. The closest you get to it, sometimes, is I think in James Cameron’s work — where it’s very, very methodically plotted and planned, and you feel the mechanics of everything that’s been very carefully formulated."

"I guess I’d have to say This Is Spinal Tap. I don’t know that many movies made me laugh as hard as that did — the first few times I saw it, anyway. I haven’t seen it in a while, but I know that at some point I will watch it again and laugh anew at it. That movie is just so brilliant. It captures something from a period in rock and roll that, even though I wasn’t there, it just feels so right. It feels like, “Oh, yeah, this is based on something real.” That time in rock and roll, and these guys are not that far off from real rock and rollers of a certain band. And it’s just brilliant. I mean, it’s just so well done, and just so funny. I mean, they were such an amazing team: Michael McKean, and then Rob Reiner directing, and Christopher Guest. You know, it’s a masterpiece, a comedy masterpiece."

"“Free Solo” is the rock climbing documentary du jour, and for very just cause. But Alex Honnold’s climbing partner Tommy Caldwell is also the subject of his own documentary, about a different historic ascent of El Capitan. It was directed by Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer, and was released almost simultaneously with “Free Solo,” and thus hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. I saw it at its premiere at SXSW in March, at which the entire audience erupted into a standing ovation – during the movie! I couldn’t help but go back for an encore screening a few nights later, which I think is the first time I’ve ever seen a movie twice at a film festival. While Honnold’s achievement is certainly more historic, Caldwell’s unbelievable life story and his accent of the titular wall with Kevin Jorgensen makes for one of the most triumphant feel-great narratives I’ve seen in years. I would recommend watching both docs, back to back, and then joining a climbing gym."

"Like many of these, this movie qualifies for me partly because it was an unexpected thrill when I first saw it in the early seventies. I’m neither much a Tony Curtis nor a Burt Lancaster fan, and I’d never heard of Alexander Mackendrick (he made half his relatively few films, including The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, in the UK; a later, strong U.S. job was A High Wind in Jamaica). Sweet Smell of Success, again, too, is quasi-noir. It’s a black-and-white, urban, small film about people’s bad luck and bad character, set in the Broadway cubicles and show-biz restaurants of New York’s sleazy show-world underbelly. Despite my prior relative indifference to the actors in it, they’re perfectly cast—against their standard types—in this, and do terrific jobs, and the script, by the highly skilled and literate Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, is spectacular. James Wong Howe shot the cold-ass thing."

"In 1968 I came to England and stayed at the Inverness Court Hotel in Bayswater. I bought a little hifi - hifi? Lofi! - in an electronics store, and bought Beggars Banquet and The White Album, and listened to them on acid. American acid. Then we went to the Roundhouse and took the guy we bought the turntable from and we never saw him again. American drugs and British drugs were different. Like the difference between American weed and the stuff you had here, mixed with tobacco, Smoke American weed and it was "Cuckoo!" - you're on the frickin' moon. Our acid was LSD from Owsley, the real stuff, and we brought it over. We were eating it like candy. And that's what we gave the to the guy who sold us the turntable. The Stones were the greatest rock'n'roll band ever. They were smart rebels, and you can't make up the stories about Keith, they're too good. They're the blueprint for every band there is."

"In My Voyage to Italy, the documentary that we made about Italian cinema, we started with this picture. For me, it really was the beginning. I saw it for the first time on television with my grandparents, and their overwhelming reaction to what had happened to their homeland since they left at the turn of the century was just as present and vivid for me as the images and the characters. I was experiencing the power of cinema itself, in this case made far beyond Hollywood, under extremely tough conditions and with inferior equipment. And I was also seeing that cinema wasn’t just about the movie itself but the relationship between the movie and its audience. Fellini said that when Rossellini was filming the Po Valley sequence, he acted on pure instinct, inventing freely as he went along. The result—in that episode, and in the Sicilian and Neapolitan and Florentine episodes as well—is still startling: it’s like seeing reality itself unfolding before your eyes."