"I had my cinematic awakening in the late ’90s, and my understanding at the time was David Lynch didn’t want the film commercially released on VHS due to perceived inferior audiovisual quality. As a result, Screen Slate contributor Patrick Dahl and I first saw Eraserhead on an nth generation VHS bootleg with burned-in Japanese subtitles that we purchased at a horror convention in a Holiday Inn near Cleveland. I understood the movie completely differently when I finally saw and heard it in a theater, but this tape has its own vibe."

"Although any one of the recent godsend rush of Kurosawa releases could go in this slot. For years now this gem (and much of his filmography) has only been available for us poor Region 1 sods on crappy import discs, and though the broken English subtitles via a bad Chinese translation had a sometimes poetic dadaistic flair, it’s a relief to finally have a beautiful, intelligible disc of it. The film itself stands easily up to Stray Dog and High and Low as one of Kurosawa’s best contemporary crime dramas."

"When I was in my early twenties, I worked as an usher at London’s National Film Theatre. They showed L’avventura with an earphone commentary instead of subtitles, but because I was working I couldn’t listen to the translation. Of course, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand a word of Italian—it blew me away regardless. The power of the compositions, the rhythm of the editing, the tone that is established from the opening frames. I decided for a while that if I was going to make films, they should all feel like Antonioni’s. I soon realized I wasn’t up to that challenge."

"This film traces the evolution of flamenco, from its origins in India through Egypt, through eastern Europe to the west – “latcho drom” means safe journey. The director is Romany himself, and there’s no narrator, so the story is told through song and subtitles with no contrivance at all. You feel properly immersed in new worlds as a result – I play flamenco, and you feel the echoes of ancient traditions in it, but this is something else. The most powerful scene is of three women singing on a hilltop about how they’ve been disenfranchised. It’s unbelievably moving."

"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."