"Cassavetes is the man. He changed filmmaking forever, in the most radical way. He is sensitive and loving in his approach. The acting is so good, sometimes you forget that it’s just a movie. The message is always love and the struggle it brings. The best part of this collection might even be the bonus documentary, A Constant Forge."

"The Dardenne I had to choose. Their documentary realism was crazily influential and it gave contemporary film language a new urgency—but it can now actually seem mannered compared to how forceful it was when it first appeared. The most accessible Dardenne, about a troubled kid—suspenseful, emotionally overwhelming, and in the end a mystical experience about hope."

"As someone who’s really passionate about what he does, I have a lot of opinions about documentary films. A lot of documentary filmmakers don’t really think about their films cinematically, and some documentaries almost seem like they were just copy-and-pasted like Microsoft Word documents. I’ve always loved how Errol Morris takes a wrecking ball to those conventions. His films are constantly exploring the idea of what a documentary is. His films tweak and twist reality, and they don’t just try to serve the audience digested ideas on a platter. If I had to pick a favorite, it’s his transcendent 1988 classic The Thin Blue Line, which recounts a murder case and then riffs and re-riffs on it like a Bach fugue. It was the first film to really use re-creation and reeneactment scenes in a new and highly cinematic way, both to explore a case and to challenge a viewer’s own bias and subjectivity. Nowadays, its approach and editing style loom over every one of these multipart true crime series and podcasts. The Thin Blue Line is almost like the influential band that’s been ripped off so often that new converts may not realize just how significant it is."