"A extraordinary document of letters, written by a man in jail under extreme duress, as he resists the Communist regime, trying not to crumble, struggling to maintain his integrity in the face of the physical and mental punishments set upon him. These letters are not particularly romantic in spite of being addressed to his wife Olga, and in many places not even personal, but they clearly show his wit and will to survive, and in the end, they outline the tenets of his philosophy. The fact that we know he ends up as the President of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic, adds to the pleasure of the reading. The many requests for tea and chocolate strike me as particularly poignant."

"I actually first discovered a lot of the films on this list, like News from Home, when I lived in New York, next to Kim’s Video, a time when I went a lot to Anthology Film Archives and Lincoln Center. Chantal Akerman has always been a big inspiration for me, and News from Home was the first film of hers that I saw. Watching it was so inspiring and made me feel like I could make movies myself, because it’s so simply done yet so affecting—just letters and an empty city. I have a very strong relationship with my mother, and she also used to send me letters when I lived in New York. I discovered Jeanne Dielman later, and a lot of the screen tests I did for Invisible Life were taken from frames from that film."

"An extraordinary memoir by an extraordinary woman. Each chapter is composed to the men (real and imagined) in her life who feel at once brilliantly mythical, and painfully earthbound. There are letters to former lovers, briefly encountered heroes, fictional paramours, and family members, and like with Lena Dunham’s book, I’ll shuffle through and reread to laugh and weep as if it were at first time."

"It’s not so easy now to admit to liking Larkin. We know too much about him as a person, because of diaries and letters that have been published, and it’s diminished his reputation somewhat, knowing that he was narrow-minded, stuffy, prejudiced. Yet still the poems are full of insight and empathy. They catalogue the endless little failures of life, all the compromises, all the missteps."