"The masterpiece. I keep an American Cinematheque membership; they do an amazing job of regularly screening classics (including many from the Criterion Collection) at two great theaters in LA. Bronwyn and I had the privilege of attending their screening of Seven Samurai at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica last year. Seeing this on the big screen, among the more talked-about aspects of this film, the unexpected humor really shines. It was the shortest, most engaging three and a half hours I’ve ever spent in a theater."

"This is a song that mixes humor and sadness beautifully. My wife and I went to see Jason in Red Bank, NJ at the Count Basie Theatre a couple years ago and this was a song I wasn’t familiar with a the time but it immediately registered with us both. I went home and found the record it was on and I think it’s a heartbreaking song with a little bit of laughter to ease the blow. It will also make you think twice about covering Hendrix… you never know who’s watching."

"I think I was graduating from college, yeah. It was just so fresh and amazing, and the storytelling, you know, changed cinema forever. I just loved it. And it brought back John Travolta. Every character was incredible, and I loved its really dark sense of humor. Like, literally some of the hardest laughing I’ve ever done in my life was when John Travolta accidentally blows the head off that guy. [laughs] Making that funny is such a feat. The comic sensibility of Quentin Tarantino never ceases to amaze me."

"When I was a teen, like for many of my generation, Monty Python were my comic heroes. But as brilliantly directed as the Python films are (look close at Monty Python and the Holy Grail—there are a lot of incredibly shot sequences), nothing prepared my for the amazing mix of humor, heart, and insane inventiveness that Terry Gilliam brought to his solo work. These two titles are films I bring up constantly in meetings in Hollywood—which usually leads to me being asked to leave. But I don’t care."

"When I was a teen, like for many of my generation, Monty Python were my comic heroes. But as brilliantly directed as the Python films are (look close at Monty Python and the Holy Grail—there are a lot of incredibly shot sequences), nothing prepared my for the amazing mix of humor, heart, and insane inventiveness that Terry Gilliam brought to his solo work. These two titles are films I bring up constantly in meetings in Hollywood—which usually leads to me being asked to leave. But I don’t care."

"Not only my favorite Criterion movie, but also my favorite movie ever. I love it so much that I’m struggling to find words to express how important it is to me. It explores many of Ozu’s most frequently recurring themes but with the humor of his later work and an unequaled degree of empathy for every character’s point of view. It expresses what it was like to be alive in Japan at a very particular moment, but it also captures what it means for anyone, anywhere, to be a human."

"I can’t nor do I want to unsee the essays in this collection. Irby is well known as a humorist, and the essays in “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life” are, indeed, very funny. They are also poignant, and incredibly honest. Humor makes way for vulnerability and by the end of this book you will have cried as much as you laughed about what it means to be a black woman, what it is to live with chronic illness, how poverty marks you, how love always finds a way."