"Maya Angelou’s final work, published a year before her death, in 2013, when she was 85 years old. It was the first book to focus on her mother, Vivian Baxter, who abandoned Angelou when she was a child and it portrays their complicated relationship. The story is about the special connection between mother and child; both women found a way to move on and form a profound and enduring bond of love and support."

"Films about the nature of performance, our collective need to watch and be artists, and the heavy cost of leading a public life. Altman’s opus is freewheeling in tone yet dense as a glittering jewel, leading to a conclusion as bleak as any American film I can think of. Bob Fosse’s penultimate film takes the fundamentals of editing and reinvents them afresh, while concluding that there are certainly worse things than death."

"Films about the nature of performance, our collective need to watch and be artists, and the heavy cost of leading a public life. Altman’s opus is freewheeling in tone yet dense as a glittering jewel, leading to a conclusion as bleak as any American film I can think of. Bob Fosse’s penultimate film takes the fundamentals of editing and reinvents them afresh, while concluding that there are certainly worse things than death."

"I choose this not because it’s my favorite but because, alongside the great sixties and seventies documentaries of Ken Russell and Peter Watkins and the films of Nicolas Roeg, this was a big influence on the stylistic choices I made when approaching my film SHOT! It’s so excessive and theatrical, and the choreography is of course stunning, but Fosse’s complete irreverence toward the subject of his own death is what really gets me."