"Le samouraï is a film I return to again and again. Like with any minimalist cinema, the less it states, the more you want to discover. Jean Pierre Melville’s film has been hugely influential, from Walter Hill’s The Driver through Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional right up to this year’s Drive. Hell, even scenes from my own Hot Fuzz are ripped out of this. The iconic image of hit man Alain Delon lying on a bed in his bare apartment with just a canary for company is still echoed today. Melville took lone warrior mythology from Japanese culture, married it with the tough guy angles of ’40s gangster movies, and, along with John Boorman and Point Blank, ushered in a new age of neo noir. It’s a beguiling picture and one to stare at for a long time. Plus, it has so little dialogue that it is literally a must-watch."

"That was a massive record for me. I remember being obsessed with the first Weezer record, then Pinkerton came out and I think it happened at the right time for me as far as feeling like a teenager, It’s funny, if you listen to it now it’s a bit of an odd, but very solid album about being awkward. The sound of it was quite unusual as well, the production, compared to the first Weezer record, it’s very live sounding and immersive. It was just what I was in the mood for as a teenager. I was chatting to someone the other day about early Weezer lyrics and how a lot of it’s quite cringy. It would get scrutinized in a different way nowadays, lines like ‘God damn you half-Japanese girls’, but I still really like this as a record. It’s a naïve record."