"Gregory Nava’s film was shown at a Friday school assembly at the private Quaker school I attended from kindergarten to twelfth grade. It was International Day or some special Friday event, and we had the whole morning blocked off. I remember being floored by the rough-hewn portrayal of migrants who were my age, crawling through sewer tunnels as if they were in a Victor Hugo novel. In my twenties, I would go on to chronicle the journeys of Latin American and Caribbean migrants who crossed into the United States without documents. I would ride in the backs of trucks with them, interview them at U.S. Border Patrol processing stations, track their families, who had paid coyotes thousands of dollars. As a thirtysomething mother living in Houston, our Guatemalan babysitter borrowed $1,800 because her son was being held in a safe house in Northern Mexico. After his release, he was picked up by Border Patrol and held at a processing center in Houston. An editorial friend of mine from the Houston Chronicle visited him there and wrote about his journey. He was eventually released and was reunited with his mother. The impact of this movie cannot be understated. I was lucky enough to meet Gregory when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter covering the lack of diversity in Hollywood, and I remain a fan of his work."

"Why, of all the Godards? Well, in part because we all know already that Breathless is one of the most important debuts in the history of cinema, that Band of Outsiders is one hell of a good time, and so on and so forth. And I might have pled the case for another favorite of mine, Alphaville. But, besides all its widescreen majesty, Contempt offers a unique hook for me. From McGilligan’s Lang biography: “At one point Michel Piccoli’s character remarks to Lang how much he and his wife enjoyed watching Rancho Notorious, with Marlene Dietrich, on the television one night. The director forthrightly replies that he himself prefers M. This was also Godard’s joke on himself. Not only did the Cahiers du cinéma crowd champion his Hollywood films above the Berlin ones, but Godard had actually written that M was ‘the least good film of Lang’s.’ ” . . . The world of cinema will forever be indebted to Godard for this Fritz Lang swan song. One elegiac image—just a few moments really, sans dialogue—speaks volumes: The director is seen lighting up a cigarette after others have exited the scene; the camera tracks beside the elder statesman of film as he walks slowly along a street alone, apparently lost in thought. Godard’s camera watches him contemplatively while, in the background, George Delerue’s eloquent score rises on a gorgeous note."

"My second favorite film is probably even more intellectually challenging than Wong Kar-Wai; it’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I f***ing love that movie! I have two children; I’ve probably seen this movie, with each child, about 50 times each. And that’s no exaggeration. There’s nothing I don’t know about this movie. I once went to a meeting with an executive in Hollywood, and they asked me what I wanted to do. I said, ‘I’d love to do a remake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang‘ — I was just making it up — ‘and I’d call it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Boom,’ and he said that’s a great title! [Laughs] I was only kidding. But that’s a movie I really love. In the UK at Christmastime, the girls would get The Sound of Music and the boys would get Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was that kind of thing, where every Christmas you would see it. So when I had kids, of course I put it on for my son and then he became obsessed with it. It’s the kind of movie where you never really get to the end; it’s so long, and the kids can only really wait so long. But the beginning of the film is like 20 minutes long, before anything even happens. It’s just the story of the car. It’s fantastic!"

"I love L.A. Confidential. If it’s on for even a second, I just watch it to the end. I almost want to call my cable service provider and ask them not to show it any more, because it has overwhelmed my life. It’s because I’m from California, from Los Angeles, because the idea of police corruption, of political ambition, of logic and defying expectations. Really, Bud White is Rudy, in the thug cop questing for detective greatness. [laughs] There’s something about that. Also, the way that it commingles all of the ideas of pornography and politics and financial development and mob power and drugs. You know, I studied history and English at UCLA, and one of the big themes in a bunch of our history classes had to do with, “How is it that Los Angeles and Hollywood and California present themselves to the world as both this destination place of palm trees and glitter and gold and your future, and also corruption and deceit?” There’s this duality to it, and I just think that Curtis Hanson’s way of delivering that… And the performances! I mean, David Strathairn and Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger and Kevin Spacey and James Cromwell… Police corruption, and justice, vigilante justice, and it’s just got everything. It’s just a perfect movie."

"I can't say this about every song on this list, but with this one I was quite aware of what the band were doing when it came out. I wouldn't say Public Enemy are my favourite band, but it's pretty close, and when this record was released, they were the most important group in the world as far as I was concerned. ""They were the most interesting, the most intelligent, and at the time, nobody was more controversial than Chuck D. They were so original; they were breaking new ground with every recording. Before It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, there just wan't music like this. ""That record came out six months before Fear of a Black Planet, and it still felt so sharply of its time because Chuck was talking about everything he'd gone through in the months leading up to it - the controversy with Professor Griff, and everything else. Later on, he said something like, ""Public Enemy is CNN for black people,"" and you get that with this song. It's totally brutal, totally brilliant, and totally of the moment. In the winter of 1990, they just meant everything. ""I've put this one on plenty of mixtapes. Plus, is that a Frankie Goes to Hollywood reference in the title? It's got to be, right?"

"I just feel like that’s a movie that I saw when I was a kid, and you watch it over and over and over again, and you’re like, “Oh, Steve Martin’s doing bits, but they fit a story.” And it’s beautifully shot and directed by Carl Reiner, which some people don’t realize, and I just can’t think of a movie that informed my comedic personality more than The Jerk. It’s also a dumb character… it breaks all these stupid rules that Hollywood has for the sake of humor, and for the sake of jokes, and it’s a feel-good movie. Oh, man. I watch it over and over and over again. It’s got bits of Woody Allen’s kind of mysticalism, but it’s not. It’s jokey but the jokes don’t have punchlines. It’s like a Steve Martin album live, and they did a good job with making it a story. In a lot of ways you have no Borat without The Jerk, you have no anything, Lebowski; all those characters are Jerk-inspired. I play dumb quite a bit; I’ll say that right now. I don’t know if you call it a crutch, or what, but I tend to lean dumb… I don’t think I would have been able to get away with that had it not been for that movie."

"I remember when this came out; I was at a restaurant celebrating someone’s birthday, and I walked by a table that was talking about Mike Leigh, I forget what film exactly. But I chimed in and said something hyperbolic. The table remarked that they all worked for Criterion. I joked that I’d thought about tattooing a line across my chest with “Criterion Collection” underneath it (the old iconic Criterion logo design). I then explained our proximity to Ray Carney and our love for Cassavetes. This was the first time I heard that a big box set was coming soon. Cassavetes is a god and a hero. My introduction to his work as a director was A Woman Under the Influence, which I bought a single version of for our mother, who is petrified of the DVD and will never watch it. Bookie, Opening Night, Faces, Shadows, and the later-added Love Streams are film school for a hundred bucks. We watch the master turn actors into people and vice versa, and hold the feeling above anything else. In the words of JC (not a coincidence) in regards to Opening Night, about Hollywood: “It’s about time it took art and said, ‘C’mon, baby! Show me something!’” (Dear Criterion, please absorb Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, and Gloria as well.)"

"I remember when this came out; I was at a restaurant celebrating someone’s birthday, and I walked by a table that was talking about Mike Leigh, I forget what film exactly. But I chimed in and said something hyperbolic. The table remarked that they all worked for Criterion. I joked that I’d thought about tattooing a line across my chest with “Criterion Collection” underneath it (the old iconic Criterion logo design). I then explained our proximity to Ray Carney and our love for Cassavetes. This was the first time I heard that a big box set was coming soon. Cassavetes is a god and a hero. My introduction to his work as a director was A Woman Under the Influence, which I bought a single version of for our mother, who is petrified of the DVD and will never watch it. Bookie, Opening Night, Faces, Shadows, and the later-added Love Streams are film school for a hundred bucks. We watch the master turn actors into people and vice versa, and hold the feeling above anything else. In the words of JC (not a coincidence) in regards to Opening Night, about Hollywood: “It’s about time it took art and said, ‘C’mon, baby! Show me something!’” (Dear Criterion, please absorb Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, and Gloria as well.)"

"I remember when this came out; I was at a restaurant celebrating someone’s birthday, and I walked by a table that was talking about Mike Leigh, I forget what film exactly. But I chimed in and said something hyperbolic. The table remarked that they all worked for Criterion. I joked that I’d thought about tattooing a line across my chest with “Criterion Collection” underneath it (the old iconic Criterion logo design). I then explained our proximity to Ray Carney and our love for Cassavetes. This was the first time I heard that a big box set was coming soon. Cassavetes is a god and a hero. My introduction to his work as a director was A Woman Under the Influence, which I bought a single version of for our mother, who is petrified of the DVD and will never watch it. Bookie, Opening Night, Faces, Shadows, and the later-added Love Streams are film school for a hundred bucks. We watch the master turn actors into people and vice versa, and hold the feeling above anything else. In the words of JC (not a coincidence) in regards to Opening Night, about Hollywood: “It’s about time it took art and said, ‘C’mon, baby! Show me something!’” (Dear Criterion, please absorb Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, and Gloria as well.)"