"Last one is A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. I don’t think it’s up there on most people’s lists. I just think it’s so beautiful. It’s very funny, but very gentle, and it also deals with issues of life and death in a very serious way. I can remember every time I saw it crying at the end. And part of it, too, is [Woody Allen] makes this incredibly good use of Mendelssohn’s music. I think the entire score is — I’m not sure about the soundtrack — but the score is Mendelssohn. I just think it’s a really exquisite piece of filmmaking."

"A boy I had a crush on gave this to me to read at university. In a way, it was my first taste of America and of New York, where I now live. It really affected me. A tragic tale of the life and death of Edie Sedgwick, the charming, broken, sophisticated, naive, sexy, innocent muse for a generation of geniuses—Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground. The Queen of the Scene and its victim, too. I couldn’t stop looking at the photo of her on the cover in all her eye make up, and trying to work her out."

"My favorite among Antonioni’s trilogy of alienation (La notte and L’eclisse are the other two). For me, these films capture the slow and painful death of love with astonishing intuition and almost no dialogue. There is nothing to be said between lovers when they fall out of love, but the silent agony of their dying relationships is captured in heartbreaking glances and body language. A shoulder turn or look away speaks volumes. Antonioni is a master of blocking actors. They move up close, far away, and out of shot in long single takes that reveal more about their emotions than any confession."

"I’ve probably seen this film more than any other. Nestor Almendros turned me on to it when I was looking for a DP to shoot Iguana. He recommended Luis Cuadrados, but I soon discovered he’d died of a brain tumor, having shot Spirit while 95 percent blind. He had his assistant describe the sets to him, then told him where to place the lights, and the intensity of each. The film itself is one of the greatest homages to movies ever made, but it’s also a poignant study of that traumatic moment in everyone’s childhood when you discover the reality of death."

"This is a film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that was called Stairway to Heaven when it was released in America. I saw it as a child and it really fascinated me, the idea that death was debatable, and it also drilled into my mind how life was so precious and flimsy. I also love how all the famous characters from history are seen in Heaven taking part in the debate. Powell/Pressburger are amazing filmmakers, and I wish we had more like them these days. “Magical realism” is a rather trite phrase, but their films are both magical and real."

"This remarkable novel, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize, takes place in a cemetery the evening after the burial of Lincoln’s son, Willie. The chorus of the dead, an astonishing cast of over 60 characters, are trapped in the Bardo, the state of existence between life and death. Another kind of bardo is taking place at the White House on the night before Willie dies. Historical diaries and letters written by those who attended the grand ball illustrate the struggle in Lincoln’s soul. His role is to be President, but he longs to be with his beloved son."

"Well, England is to my taste a great, great film country. I don’t think any filmmakers have been greater than Hitchcock, fabulously represented in the Criterion Collection by The Lady Vanishes and a great box set, Wrong Men & Notorious Women; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, represented by many films, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (one of their very best, also made during World War II); and of course Mike Leigh. Topsy-Turvy is so fascinating, because Mike Leigh celebrates precisely the approach to acting that he has driven his own actors farther and farther away from in his own films."

"We all know the deal: a group of people want to get together and do something simple—see a movie, drink some coffee, eat some dinner. But it never works out that way. That’s what Buñuel did here, but with greater stakes/steaks on the table. Levity and seriousness, the intrusion of the surreal into the upper crust, forcing a single question at the end: would anyone portrayed in the film actually watch the film? After all, each oneiric explosion in it is something the politesse class doesn’t speak of at the table: sex, death, religion."

"After a life of watching silver-screen idols and debonair ne’er-do-wells, this film came out like a punch to the sternum. It showed that film was not simply a convenient vessel for story and adventure but could say much deeper things about us, as if we were shifting pieces on chessboards . . . but also about death, about the Crusades, about fighting or playing for one’s soul. And what comes after it all: a credit scene, starring everyone important in your life? There’s more to it, more to this film than it lets on—and I’ve been thinking about it for years."