"I love soulful noirs, and this slow-burn Austrian crime thriller is one of my faves of the new millennium. It’s as if Bergman made a movie about cops and robbers. Austrian director Götz Spielmann gets incredible naturalistic performances, and the storytelling has some real breathing space, which is rare in crime thrillers. (For another soulful Criterion crime pic, give The Hit a look-see.) What I love most about Revanche is this narrative magic trick it pulls. You think it’s going to be a relatively conventional story about a robbery that goes off the rails and criminal-code revenge. But instead it turns into this deep exploration about the intersection of people and the happenstances that lead us down surprising paths in our lives (a theme that I explored in my documentary Magical Universe. Find it!). Like the best noirs, the crime plot is just the Trojan horse that takes you into a profound story about choice and consequence. Before you even know it, Revanche has morphed into something like a Kieślowski film, and it suddenly knocks you on the floor and leaves you in a heap."

"I chose Both Sides Now because it was reworkings of some of her songs, and I only came across it after watching a documentary on the radio. It brought me to some songs I'd never heard before but then I fell in love with, such as 'A Case Of You', which is just amazing. I think it really made me revisit her lyrics. There's something about taking your songs and revisiting them and yet still being true to the songs - many others have tried to do it, but sound shit. Hers were equally as beautiful. So I chose that record as a fulcrum in my Joni Mitchell journey, as I first liked her more almost obscure albums, those that were in my parents' collection, such as Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm and Dog Eat Dog, and then I found Blue, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns and Court And Spark. But I like this album because it took me there, and as an artist, it shows the measure of her songs. Where she can make that sort of record and still make me want to hear the others, and love them too."

"[Sidney] Lumet, Dog Day Afternoon. I mean, I don’t know what there is to say about Al Pacino’s performance as John Wojtowicz. But it’s a really complicated, really emotionally messy, but driven performance. Now there’s a documentary about the real guy called “something” Dog; I forgot the name of it [editor’s note: it’s The Dog], but the doc is just as much worth seeking out. It’s almost kind of neat to see it after you watch the movie. But the way that Dog Day Afternoon unfolds almost in real time over the course of one day in Brooklyn. And the John Cazale character. First of all, it’s just a beautiful portrait of an outlier community. The homosexual community at a specific time in New York, and that niche, there were these tough guys. They were going to do anything for their dream, anything – rob a bank. But nothing they do goes right. But watching him get wrapped up in his own ego and the drama of it and the romance; it’s one of the most romantic movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a really, really beautiful film, but it’s devastating. It’s also a very regional film. I love it."

"I’ll start with This is Spinal Tap. It sort of took an American perspective to show the characters and the attitudes surrounding British rock bands in the 1970s and 1980s, which, I guess, was what it was supposed to be, and I just thought the characters drawn were so excellent. And yet, it was odd, because everyone involved was American. You’d think it’d be just the kind of thing that some British writers or comedians could’ve done better, but clearly we didn’t. And I thought Christopher Guest, et al., did it fantastically well. It’s just always a kind of reassuringly funny film. The best comedy is watching humans interact, and people with their own petty ambitions, and self delusions, and all that sort of stuff. And that movie is absolutely brim full of it. If they say that comedy is essentially exaggerated truth, that was almost the perfect exemplar of it, where it’s almost a documentary. Well, it is obviously a mockumentary, but you don’t have to exaggerate much for it to become inherently comic. So that’s kind of what it is. It’s a perfect exaggeration, but exaggerated not very much."

"There are certain movies that I always go back to, but before I make a movie, I always find myself watching The Last Detail, the Hal Ashby movie. There’s something about it that’s so alive. It’s one of the first movies to really have frank language. I think it was somewhat shocking at the time. It was the first movie where everyone aggressively cursed, but it was about people in the armed services. It’s also a small story that’s very intimate and you just fall in love with all these characters that are in this terrible situation. I always watch it because Hal Ashby shot it in such a way that it just feels real. It’s almost like a documentary. I like how he paces the scenes, the coverage, and I always go back to it because it reminds me that the most important thing I can do as a filmmaker is convince the audience that what they’re watching is really happening. I don’t want them to be aware of me. So that’s one movie. It’s both heartbreaking and hilarious, which is always my favorite combination."