"Jean Pierre-Melville was the undisputed master of the French crime drama. Here he turns his gaze on the French Resistance during World War II (of which he himself was a member) in an entirely unsentimental, unflinching portrait. It not only de-romanticizes the movement with its rigorous and austere account of the day-to-day operations in this gray world, it also indicts it. For all the good the Resistance did, its members were only human: prone to betrayal and petty revenge. The movie is so specific in its regard of the loneliness and fear of these operatives, whose everyday lives alternate between boredom and peril. Unreleased in this country for thirty-seven years, the film was an absolute revelation to me when I saw it upon its release in 2006. Already a major fan of Melville’s crime films, I loved how this one both expands and distills his unique technical skills and his ability to tap into his characters’ emotional states. What emerges is something both complex in design and deeply personal. Casablanca it is not. Melville shows us the inner workings of something so intricate and important while also asking us whether the ends truly justify the means."

"And then, I guess, The Sting is the next one I gotta say. This was for me, and probably for a lot of people, at least of our generation, our first exposure to con men movies was from The Sting. It really holds up. Like a lot of the movies on this list, it holds up because of the central relationship, because of the Newman-Redford thing. Watching those two guys together, even though at this point, plotwise, I would be fairly… Well, I don’t know. I wonder, if someone saw The Sting clean for the first time today, now with all the movies that have imitated it in the years since, whether anyone would actually kind of say “Oh my God” at the end of it. I don’t know, but I don’t know that it would matter, because I think the fun of the film is in the game playing, and specifically in the way that these two guys play off of each other. It seems like something that’s particularly vulnerable, just because of the twist, the nature of the end. But like I said, that’s not really what makes the movie tick, oddly enough. It holds up just as a really fun ride."

"Tom Waits really brings a lot of showbiz into his records. It’s in there in the actual songwriting. He knows how to strip things down and get to some skeletal place that’s really strong. He’s trying to be true to his Jazz and his Blues. That is to be admired. There’s a lot of the textures you don’t hear so much. All that vocabulary is really seductive. I think that he’s a good songwriter whatever record you talk about of his. It’s not because there’s some fucking guy playing a saw. It’s like the Bruce Springsteen thing. It’s stripped down, universal, folky bluesy stuff. He’s trying to say: “You guys think you can change things overnight. Forget the new thing. What about Django Reinhart? Son House?” It’s like the Grand Duchy thing. People get obsessed with our production like, “What’s the new story?” It’s admirable when people say: “What about 1949, man?!” At first, I heard a cool White Stripes record and thought: “Who do you think you are, Robert Johnson?” And I get jealous. Fucking A! man. It’s like primal Led Zeppelin or something. But at the end of the day, I always end up respecting Jack White. [Black does an impression of the 'Seven Nation Army' riff.] Jack White has some believability."

"This is a weird tie. But A Room with a View was my favorite movie when I was nine. And it really screwed with my head. It’s so over-the-top romantic, and I remember it made me dizzy with desire. I really expected nothing less than Julian Sands in a Tuscan poppy field from my adult romantic life. And Criterion is about to release it . . . I’m really excited about this. Honestly, I haven’t seen it since I was like fifteen, so it’s high time to revisit it. But I’m a little scared to revisit it, too, so I’m pairing it with another about-to-released Criterion movie, Agnes Varda’s Documenteur, which I saw recently at Lincoln Center and really, really loved. Documenteur is this gorgeous, weird portrayal of heartbreak and aimless wandering through a strange city trying to find an apartment. Watching it gets you in touch with all the times you’ve felt horribly depressed and also overwhelmed by the beauty and color of everything around you. It’s kind of about what happens after you get together with Julian Sands and have a kid with him and then you separate and suddenly you’re a single mother wandering around Los Angeles crying."

"I think to this day that whole album, Fly Or Die is one of my top buys for so many reasons - every time I go back to it there's other things I hear in it. Even bigger than that, it was Pharrell and what he did with N/E*/R/D. It was the first thing that I identified with. I used to skateboard, and I always felt like what I was doing was ‘other’. And then I saw that and I was like ‘Oh. Sick.’ Someone gets it. There’s another black guy, skateboarding and they were into rap and hip hop and making beats and he plays drums. It was like there's room to do what I do, you know what I mean? This has never sounded old, like some records do. Some records of that era you listen back and they don’t age well. But I feel like that particular one, it's still very raw, still very honest. That was one of the first CDs I got in secondary school. My brother went to America and brought it back. And I was like ‘What dyou get for me?’ and he was like ‘Uhhhh... here.’ I’m glad I asked that question."