"I have to put this one on, if only to celebrate the efforts of a few twenty-four-year-old friends just out of film school, ganging up to turn our college house into a summer camp and haul a Moviecam Super America around the dirt lots of North Carolina, making a movie none of us knew would have any impact on anyone anywhere. I remember how ecstatic we were to find out Criterion was releasing us on video. At such an early time in our careers, that Criterion liked our first film made us feel like we had a place at the table with our heroes. What a way to begin!"

"Again, limiting myself to only one film per director, I went with Mon oncle to stand for Tati’s body of work. It was hard not to pick Playtime, but now that I’ve seen it a few times in 70 mm, I’m not sure I can ever bring myself to watch it on television (and I own the Criterion version). I had the opportunity to see M. Hulot’s Holiday a number of times as a teen and in college, but it never did much for me. Mon oncle was different. It was a revelation, so charming and brilliantly inventive, yet understated. It is a film I can watch again and again (and I have)."

"“I hope to build a house with my films,” Fassbinder famously said. “Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.” For me, the front door to that house is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. I first watched it when I was home from college one December, and my young and impressionable mind was instantly changed. The use of long takes, the meticulous, ever-moving camera direction, the outlandish costumes, the emotional cruelty, the wigs . . . Fassbinder finds beauty in despair, and despair in beauty, but ultimately knows that the real truth lies in the costume changes."

"I discovered Fassbinder senior year of college, and I couldn’t believe it. Both of these films are perfect to me. Ali tells a grotesque yet delicate love story that, to my dummy liberal arts mind, was an analogy for the challenges of a gay relationship in the repressed Germany of the 1970s (at least that’s what I said in my thesis). Maria Braun is the tragic, triumphant story of a woman who does what she must to get by, but loses herself in the process. They both make you wanna dress up and smoke opium and fuck people you meet late at night in a bodega, even if you’re not into that."

"I discovered Fassbinder senior year of college, and I couldn’t believe it. Both of these films are perfect to me. Ali tells a grotesque yet delicate love story that, to my dummy liberal arts mind, was an analogy for the challenges of a gay relationship in the repressed Germany of the 1970s (at least that’s what I said in my thesis). Maria Braun is the tragic, triumphant story of a woman who does what she must to get by, but loses herself in the process. They both make you wanna dress up and smoke opium and fuck people you meet late at night in a bodega, even if you’re not into that."