"The Shining. It was the first movie that I saw when I was a kid that, like, really traumatized me. It was mostly the two little girls as well as being in room 237. That was one of the movies that I remember really, after watching that movie, having a problem sleeping. But as I’ve sort of grown up with that movie, what’s been so inspirational about that movie… if you watch that movie, like everybody watches that movie, it’s terrifying, it’s one of the scariest movies of all time. And what I think’s great about it is that it’s not only a horror movie, it’s more a movie about an alcoholic man who hates his family, and then it’s a horror movie. To me, all the best horror movies are a regular movie first and then they’re a horror movie. That’s true with the The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby as well as The Shining. But what’s most exciting to me about The Shining, and there’s a famous quote from the Vivian Kubrick documentary, from Jack Nicholson, where he says he’s been spending his whole career trying to make his performances real, like no one’s ever seen realness onscreen and he’s going to be the one to make it real and he’s going to do something no one’s ever seen before, this quest to make it authentic. And then he’s like, “Then you get someone like Stanley who says, ‘Yeah, Jack, it’s real, but it’s just not interesting.'” After I heard that conversation, if you watch The Shining and don’t get sucked into it just being a great scary movie, if you walk into it and just watch the choices that are being made, it’s an insane movie. Like, everybody’s performance is, like, the stakes are so high, as if every line they say is the end of the world. Every shot is so grandiose. The locations are so unbelievable, and they’re all built, which is also totally insane. It’s like this constructed movie that’s so hypnotic because every time Shelly Duval comes on the screen and screams, “[falsetto] They’re trying to kill Danny!” and it’s like, in any other movie that would just be like a joke. Or Jack Nicholson, if you look at every take of his in the movie, [it] shouldn’t work. It’s all so extreme with his performance. But it’s consistent and, I guess as Stanley Kubrick said, it’s interesting. Because it’s consistent, the movie has this very hypnotic tone to it and it’s something that Kubrick is obviously very known for. It not only is an amazingly terrifying movie and one of the best horror movies of all time, it also is just this really unique approach to filmmaking that I’ve always found really fascinating. It seems to, across the board, raise the stakes and make everybody just operate on this much higher level, and that’s always been very hypnotic to me."

"This came out in late 2018, only I saw it in January this year in Budapest. I’m going to sneak it into this list, as it was ironically and frustratingly overlooked by many film writers when it won a FIPRESCI award in Cannes despite the abundance of articles complaining about the dearth of films from women in the festival that year. Zsófia Szilágyi’s micro-budget debut film about motherhood in present-day Budapest deserves all the praise it can get. At first, I didn’t regard the kids in the film as that much of a handful. No industrial-strength tantrums, nothing spilt or broken, no fussiness at dinner and so on. But maybe the focus is more on the logistics of parenthood rather than especially difficult moments with one’s children. I was initially too focused on what was missing from the film and in the process overlooked many other great qualities – the beautifully naturalistic acting, the relentlessness of getting three kids from different sets of A-B and back within a busy city and the sound design that teased out the various everyday noises we’d normally cancel out. Also, the kids do give the parents a run of sorts for their money, but more of a jog than a run. The acting really is first class and all across the board. I have no idea how Szilágyi got such great performances from kids so young. The dad isn’t around much and it’s pretty much a solo show for the mother struggling with work and kids. There’s a wonderful shot of her at the window of an all-night pharmacy buying painkillers for her son and looking beyond exhausted. There’s also a brilliant altercation between the mother and some typical alpha male in a car park. My favorite moment was with the “orrszi porszi,” which is a vacuum adapter that goes up toddlers’ noses. It’s the kind of gross-out contraption that you’d expect to find in an early John Waters film, but Hungarians swear by it. The Brits think the Hungarians are crazy vacuuming snot and the Hungarians think the Brits are crazy not doing anything about snot and maybe that’s why the film wasn’t picked up for distribution in the UK. The film’s strength is in showing us most of the moments that are glossed over in more regular fare such as the time it takes to dress young kids, the repetition and the complete lack of time for oneself. Although it’s very different from Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman,” it still shares the dedication to a perspective and experience that is normally deodorized from cinema. I have to confess to being confused by the protagonist’s use of a mobile phone whilst driving, but then again, should all protagonists be perfect or is this an example of how pushed she is with all the multi-tasking she has to do with work and parenthood?"