"Raising Arizona. It’s definitely in the top five. I remember seeing that movie as a VHS rental when I was, I think, 12 years old. I’d just had an operation, and I was recovering at home, and my mom just went and got a bunch of movies, and that was one that I could not… I couldn’t even comprehend it the first time I saw it. It was so weird. It was so beautifully weird. At least from my perspective, I had never seen a comedy toned quite like that before, and I just loved it, and I couldn’t get enough of it, and I wound up just watching it over and over again. It wasn’t just funny writing, it was funny looking. The acting is incredible, and the casting, the production design, the cinematography, the score… Carter Burwell, he wrote this haunting score that’s based on an old traditional tune, “Down in the Willow Garden”, which is this kind of haunting river ballad, and it’s the musical motif through the whole thing. It even plays during the diaper robbery scene in the convenience store. There’s like a Muzak version of that playing, and I caught all those little things. I was blown away by the specificity and the choices, and it was one of many movies that I kind of point to as being a moment that, for me, kind of stood out as, “Oh, this is what I want to do with my life.”"

"It’s difficult to pick a Woody Allen film. In terms of my favorite person who’s been in a film it would be Woody Allen, so therefore it feels that I’ve got to pick a Woody Allen film. I think he’s the best performer that’s ever been in films, in a way; certainly sound-era films. Just his voice is the best voice that has ever been recorded, I think. Even if he had just been a writer of comic prose, he would have been one of the best writers of comic prose. His best films have so much life to them, and they’re funny. I know he often has a low self-estimation of them publicly, but Crimes and Misdemeanors, in terms of his feeling that he hasn’t made a film as good as Rashōmon or Bicycle Thieves — I think it’s definitely a film that could be held up with those films, really. It’s just very brutal, but funny as well. Just everything: the music, that professor and how kind of depressing it is, but how many great lines it has. And such a good cast: everyone’s really suited to his style. Not every actor is suited to being in a Woody Allen film. Seems like Owen Wilson is really suited to it [in Midnight in Paris], from what I’ve seen, in the same way that John Cusack was so good in Bullets Over Broadway. For me it’s just infinitely rewatchable."

"I watch this with my family a lot. All of the Marx Brothers movies have been very popular in the Columbus household for the last 20 years or so. I was a bit of a dictator making my kids watch these movies. They grew up with them because kids are really reluctant to watch black-and-white films. Our family loved the Marx Brothers films, and for some reason the one that we always went back to, and the one that we were obsessed with, was Horse Feathers. It’s 1932, so that’s going back a long way. Yet at the same time I would show that movie to my kids who were seven and five and three, and they were mesmerized. I learned a lot about comedy and breaking the rules in that movie — in terms of comedy — which extended to seeing movies like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and Annie Hall to a certain extent. The Marx Brothers started it all, and it’s smart comedy. The funny thing about the movie is, there are scenes that, still for me and my family, are falling down funny. So they can watch that movie and take away from it — maybe laugh a little harder than they do at some of the more modern comedies. That movie — and there’s like five or six Marx Brothers movies — is just a wonderful sort of family experience and that’s why it’s on the list."

"One is probably the biggest surprise for my fanbase. If they were to say, “What’s the movie that would most surprise someone that Omari likes?” it would be Mean Girls. I love Mean Girls. Freaking love it. I think she’s at an age where she can watch it. So, we had it on, days before we get on the plane to come back to New York, because obviously, this time of year, we keep coming back for the start of Power. She started kindergarten, so I thought she’s old enough to watch it. But that fight scene in the hallway, with the girls, when everybody goes crazy on each other. She ran out, into her playroom, and I looked at my wife, like, “It’s Mean Girls. It’s not that bad.” What I realized is, part of my daughter’s reaction was because it’s so… not necessarily over the top, but it is. Where it’s not over the top is, girls, as you and I know, that’s the way they fight. Whereas, in kindergarten, we punched each other in the face, and then the guy that you punched becomes your best friend for 35 years. So, it’s just the level of truth in it that makes it so freaking funny. The level of how mean girls can be to each other just makes it really, really funny. Also, I just find Tina Fey’s writing to be very subtle, and so good."