"I have been collecting Criterion Collection DVDs almost as long as I have owned a DVD player,” writes Alex Ross Perry, the director of Impolex (2009), The Color Wheel (2011), and Listen Up Philip (2014). “These are not my top ten favorite films in the Criterion Collection but my top ten favorite Criterion Collection DVD purchases. This is virtually impossible. My entire apartment has pockets of Criterion DVDs everywhere, and I am forced to just go with my gut and pick ten that shaped my ideas of cinema, meant a lot to me, and I can’t imagine not owning and having access to whenever I desire"

"I have been collecting Criterion Collection DVDs almost as long as I have owned a DVD player,” writes Alex Ross Perry, the director of Impolex (2009), The Color Wheel (2011), and Listen Up Philip (2014). “These are not my top ten favorite films in the Criterion Collection but my top ten favorite Criterion Collection DVD purchases. This is virtually impossible. My entire apartment has pockets of Criterion DVDs everywhere, and I am forced to just go with my gut and pick ten that shaped my ideas of cinema, meant a lot to me, and I can’t imagine not owning and having access to whenever I desire"

"Okay, this might be really cheesy. I can’t stop thinking about The Sandlot. I have a thing for retro movies. I mean, I know it’s not retro for a lot of people, but for me it is because, obviously, my age. The Sandlot is one of my favorite movies because of the storyline and because the characters are so young. It was just so interesting and so cool to see young actors give such big personalities to these characters. It was something that just stuck with me. I remember the lead guy [Tom Guiry] being really cute and just thinking that he was adorable."

"Well, I’m definitely a hopeless romantic and Titanic is one of my favorite movies. It basically came out when I was born, but my mom [showed me] Titanic when I was about — I want to say like eight, nine years old. It’s one of the movies I can never get tired of. I could watch it all the time. Actually, I had a really geeky moment: the make up artist that worked on this last film that I worked on — she had worked on Titanic, and I was like, “No way!” I freaked out and got to see a lot of behind-the-scenes pictures. I was totally fan-girling."

"I grew up mostly not having cable. Consequently, I watched a lot of reruns of British comedies that ended up on our local PBS station in Iowa: Are You Being Served, Red Dwarf, and Doctor Who, to name but a few. This educated me on the intricacies of British humor. [Holy Grail] is the funniest film I’ve ever seen, hands down. Irreverent, absolutely silly, witty, and smart. Plus, it’s set in Medieval times, which, as you can see from my first pick is also a sweet spot for me. If you don’t like this movie, we may not be able to be the best of friends."

"As I said, I love filmmakers who struggle, and I’ve always gotten the feeling that De Palma struggles. I feel in his work that there’s something awkward, something that is not flowing easily, and that makes me watch the film from a different perspective. In Blow Out, the storyline is very pristine, there’s nothing distracting, and you get to see and observe all the details in a special way. There’s a lot of information in his films, but like Tati, it’s all at a deeper layer. You could see a De Palma film and think it’s very ordinary, but if you see it more than once, it always gets better."

"I really, genuinely don’t like favorite lists because you always leave stuff out. So there are a lot of important films I could put in like The Godfather Part II, perhaps, or The Godfather Part I, but I’m going to go with The Empire Strikes Back for number three only because it’s Empire Strikes Back! I don’t think I need to say why. It’s so good. It takes what arguably could be just a simple science fiction movie and really takes it to this other place that is just so engaging and so believable and dramatic as well. Not overly dramatic, but dramatic. I love that film a great deal."

"Oh, The Godfather. If it gets any better than that… I mean, it’s so beautifully shot. I’m not a fan of violent movies, but that one is such an epic film. The violence is part and parcel of the story they’re telling, so, it’s legitimate. In a weird way, I find there’s no gratuitous violence in it. Even though there’s a lot of shooting in that thing, every time there’s a shootout, I found it upsetting and horrifying as opposed to films which just trade on mowing human beings down. Those I find pornographic and not sad. I think it does damage to our society, personally."