"This was the first in a series of books that feature a mouse, a vain cat, and a wombat. Everything the wombat says is nonsense (“Oh wonderful, fish—my favorite fruit.”), and it made me howl with laughter as a kid. I was brought up in East Africa, and was at school with all the international kids. We’d all been given our copies of A.A.Milne and Dr. Seuss, but people know those books. The Muddleheaded Wombat deserves a place among them."

"Natalie Portman plays a young teenage pop artist, Celeste, who starts making music after surviving a school shooting. Then it becomes a film about what the pop industry can do to people, what not to do within it, and about messiah complexes. It’s a really over-the-top, sinister film – it becomes almost alien. But it also reminds you to keep your ego in check, pull your baseball cap down, don’t get lost in the madness, and just keep working."

"In film school, I took a critical-studies course on Bresson. He's a filmmaker I'm certain I would never have experienced if I hadn't been forced to. And I really fell in love. This is my favorite of his films. There's a distance in his filmmaking, an artifice in his staging, that makes it feel mythic. This story felt so familiar to me, like it echoed my own teenage experience of being a girl, the terror of sex, puberty, love, industrialization, cultural apathy."

"I wrote a grad school research paper on Cassavetes. I was so intoxicated by his approach and filmmaking philosophy that I got lost in in my research and turned the paper in six months late. Fortunately, I still passed my class. There are so many amazing moments in this film, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget watching the spaghetti scene for the first time. It’s disorienting, human, and absolutely riveting. Cassavetes reminds us that people are impulsive, generous, complicated, self-conscious beings."

"My parents’ convictions, when it came to discipline, were not very strong. For my bar mitzvah, I gave out a mixtape of ’90s grunge — if you got it now, you would think it was the Singles soundtrack. And the last song on it was “Freedom” by Rage Against the Machine, which has a minute of Zack de la Rocha screaming, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Suspended, instantly. Hebrew day school. They’re all up in your biz."

"“The Peanut Butter Falcon” is a must-see that will melt your heart. It should be shown in every school in America, because no one can leave this film and see people with disabilities the same way again. The love and beauty in every frame of this film is palpable, and it’s charming as heck. In fact, I would say Shia LaBeouf and Zack Gottsagen on the run together makes for the greatest love story of the year, tied only with…"

"I read this alarmist right-wing book about cults in my school library, and at the time I was like, “Cults – this is amazing!” There was a section on satanic cults. They had a whole chapter about Venom and their Black Metal LP. It quoted the lyrics to “Sacrifice” about drinking a chalice of blood – and I remember thinking ‘this is so stupid and crazy’: I had to buy the album. It wasn’t as heavy and scary as I thought it would be."