"Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence strike me as two of the most psychological films ever made. The former dramatizes madness, and it doesn’t shy away from the despair and horror of the subject. It is equally fascinated by the way that lives are halted, turned, and redirected by tragedy. The Silence is possibly the most Freudian film ever made, a fever dream about the short journey from sexual ecstasy to absolute despair. Fanny and Alexander was Bergman’s Amarcord, a melancholy epic punctuated by moments of unexpected joy. It’s an incredibly rich film, a culmination of a life spent mastering film and theater. All three of these movies were shot by the great Sven Nykvist."

"I’d die a happy man if we could Riff this one live. Never has a film been so perfect for us. I had heard my nieces talk about the books and how much they were going to love this film. I actually went to a movie theater to see Twilight — a grown man on my own on a Monday so no one would see me — and I came back and emailed immediately, “You guys, you guys, we have to have to have to do this film.” And it’s one of our most popular. It’s so perfect. In every turn it begs for someone to mock it. It is so dead earnest about itself, it is so serious."

"This was the movie, when I was a kid. This and Bugsy Malone. I know all of the dialogue in these two movies from repeated viewings at the movie theater. The Vogue and the Alpha 3 theaters in Louisville. And Ruth Gordon gave me a gateway to Hollywood screenwriting history, and Cat Stevens a gateway to transformation through music. Harold took life’s lemons and made a black psychedelic monolithic lemonade. I learned to do that too. Comedy in death, comedy in failure, comedy in being mystified by societal expectations. I was very fond of MGM musicals during my childhood, and Harold and Maude felt like the closest thing to a modern-day evolution of one of those."

"Oh, there are so many better films I might have chosen; better Bergmans too. But this is the film that sparked my repertory movie theater habit—back in the days, kids, when there was no such thing as home video, much less the DVD. This was the film that opened up a big wide world beyond what’s-playing-this-week to a young teen, the film that convinced me that this world was worth driving an hour or two or more to sample again and again. For that—and, yes, for its much-parodied yet still powerfully iconic imagery—it’ll always have a place on that inner shelf bridging the heart and mind."