"Todd Haynes’s gorgeous 1995 metaphor for the AIDS crisis, Safe, is no less timely today. Julianne Moore turns in an amazingly subtle performance as a rich white lady struggling with a mysterious autoimmune disease who retreats to a wellness community. Her character predates all the gluten free, anti-vaxxer, yoga-obsessed, Goop-reading, Lyme-diseased ladies of today and shows what empty, sad, colorless lives their “authentic selves” are left to lead . . . Namaste, motherfuckers. While Safe is all muted colors, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the in-your-face brash vision of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. His plastic-surgery-victim women are camera-ready for a 2016 The First Wives of Beverly Hills reality show. I love this movie’s intoxicating mix of humor and horror."

"Antonioni’s best film. This movie puts me into such a pleasurable deep funk. Profound, chic, visual existentialism has always been up my alley. Every image is boldly striking—from the hustle and bustle of the stock market (as timely as today’s headlines) to the urban architectural landscapes to the lovers Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. The last are especially easy on the eyes. This movie caters to the intellectual fantasy in many of us. If you are a professional philosopher or lay thinker (like myself) who likes to contemplate the nature of “reality,” the last ten minutes will totally blow your circuits. This is one very cool movie. Richard Peña’s commentary has so much information, minute for minute, you wonder how the guy keeps it all in his head."

"And then Frances — do you remember the movie Frances, with Jessica Lange? I love that movie, too. It’s such an amazing portrait of a woman losing herself into a different reality. I did a movie called Babycall and it’s also about a woman with two realities, in a way, and she’s kind of drifting in and out. She knows that she should stay in this world and that she should be focused; she needs to pull herself together and sort out her brain, but at the same time she can’t control it. I think that Jessica did it beautiful and so strong. It just broke my heart, that movie. So when I did Babycall, I revisited Frances. So that one is a movie that I love. It always inspires me."

"I watched it, I think, right before we started writing this movie too. I don’t know if it’s because my mom is Swedish, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Sweden, but I love Lukas Moodysson’s Together. I love the realness of it and the people trying to raise a family in this commune-type environment. I think my favorite scene is the breakfast scene with people coming down, and they’re naked from the waist down. I still have that image in my head. It’s just a perfect sense of reality and shock, and it’s not shocking to them at all, but it’s obviously shocking to the viewer. But not in a way that’s it’s going for an effect. They’re all eating breakfast and you’re seeing everyone’s pubic hair."

"Todd Haynes’s gorgeous 1995 metaphor for the AIDS crisis, Safe, is no less timely today. Julianne Moore turns in an amazingly subtle performance as a rich white lady struggling with a mysterious autoimmune disease who retreats to a wellness community. Her character predates all the gluten free, anti-vaxxer, yoga-obsessed, Goop-reading, Lyme-diseased ladies of today and shows what empty, sad, colorless lives their “authentic selves” are left to lead . . . Namaste, motherfuckers. While Safe is all muted colors, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the in-your-face brash vision of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. His plastic-surgery-victim women are camera-ready for a 2016 The First Wives of Beverly Hills reality show. I love this movie’s intoxicating mix of humor and horror."

"This novella is explicitly a book about ridicule and caricature—Professor Pnin is a joke of a man on a college campus. He’s an awkward Russian émigré with bad English, false teeth, a clumsy sense of humor, a tendency to burst into tears or take offense at small slights. Everybody on campus can do an impression of him. He’s a clown. But at the core of the book is the idea that there is a Pnin who is as real as the people who ridicule him. You are invited to laugh at him, and then you are humbled and shamed by your own laughter. It’s a gorgeous, hilarious, humane book that uncovers the reality of a man’s life in sly, piecemeal fashion. I think it’s my favorite novel."

"This slim novel is one of the most intriguing works of literature I have come upon in a long while. Part mystery, part metaphysical journey, part fairy tale, part adult love story, it brought me to a state of the most welcome strangeness, similar to the one I sought out as a young reader of books that challenged how we perceive reality and reconstruct it in text. In the narrative’s mysterious, slow burn of a chase, a woman who has left her husband is tracked down in The Taiga, a territory where the laws of nature are as much out of joint as the rules of its isolated human society. In its uneasy atmosphere there are echoes from Tarkovsky's film Stalker as well as from golden age private eye novels."