"I saw Robert Flaherty’s 1922 quasi-documentary film in fourth grade. We watched it on some weird early-’70s, pre-video school format where the teacher popped something that looked like a tape into a machine that jiggled as it played ten-minute segments on a small, dark screen. It looked like shit but the film left an indelible impression on me. The blubber-eating scene, mixed with the perfumed scent of Eugenie, my fourth-grade crush—oops, I mean, teacher—is a heady sense-memory."

"This unreleased Rolling Stones documentary was a film you’d always hear about but know you’d never, ever see. Now I can watch it online anywhere within seconds. It’s better than you think. It shows just how insane their lives were while they were making some of their best music, in hotel rooms doing drugs, with all this weird shit going on. People who see them in stadiums now wouldn’t relate to those characters, but this proves they were always phenomenal, even in their craziest hours."

"For me, this created a whole new layer of filmmaking. It’s an amazing movie, and a little bit like La strada in that you don’t have to be a filmmaker or enthusiast to appreciate it. It just plays out like a really good documentary and a really good fiction, and it says a lot not only about Iranian society but about the human condition. This is the richest movie Kiarostami made, in my opinion, and it’s one of the best works of Iranian cinema."

"This is the first documentary I remember seeing. I watched it with a group of people who were very stoned. I was not, but I didn’t need to be to get sucked into this totally bizarro world. I have seen the movie so many times that parts of it are burned into my brain, and I can’t see an opossum without thinking about it. I wonder about these people all the time. I am very curious to know how many of them are still around."

"The granddaddy of all modern comedies, Spinal Tap set the gold standard for the mock documentary. Just like with Stranger Than Paradise, I had an encounter with this film when I was in film school: I drove past the set one day in downtown L.A. and saw the band in their wardrobe walking to the set, and thought it looked like some dumb movie with crazy costumes. Little did I know I was so close to the set of one of the funniest movies ever made."

"Sandra Bullock was clearly tired and emotional when she said, in Gravity, that she hated space. How could you not love space, and how could you not love a documentary about how we—yes, all mankind—made it to the moon and back? Turned out the best thing about the moon was the view of Earth, but it was worth going all that way just to feel better about home. My only complaint is that the film could be three hours—or three days—longer."

"It looked like a documentary. It’s like a found footage movie, but in the hood, and this s–t is incredible, the way he flipped it, because you could tell some of the elements were reenacted, but some of those elements look real as s–t. No lie. And this guy that’s starring in it — his last name is Snow; I don’t remember his first name — he’s not an actor. Not an actor. This is his real life. I’m tellin’ you man, this movie…"