"What I love about Mulholland Dr. is its full commitment to and immersion in this world of chaotic femininity that almost seems to loop and has no beginning, middle, or end. It’s my favorite film, and I think it’s the best film about actresses and being an actress. How Lynch destabilizes the idea of what a realistic character is—I find that more true to the chaotic emotional reality that the film is trying to convey than something more linear. This film just plucks away at something deep and dark in the back of my monkey brain, and I can’t get enough of it. The way he uses mood and sound, and the way he has nightmarish visions and images, like the lady behind the dumpster—he just lets that hover over the film and you feel like you’re going to see her again but you never do. I know there have been criticisms of the way he portrays women, particularly white women, and white people. People critique the lack of diversity in his films, and I understand why, but I almost feel as though ideas like whiteness and femininity are characters in his films that he explodes in the way I believe they should be."

"I always come back to this idea of chaotic femininity or chaotic femme. It’s a discourse I have with some of my nerdier friends, like a standard for representations of women that we gravitate to and are driven crazy by. What Assayas does in this film, with the layers of fiction and reality, and representation of representations of representations, is similar to Mulholland Dr.: he interrogates this idea of the actress and the very idea of a character, and leaves you with a queasy feeling about what it all adds up to. What I love about this, particularly as embodied in Juliette Binoche’s performance, is the idea of a woman who is resigned to a downfall and is just fascinated to see how it all plays out. What is this thing that leads women with stable socioeconomic circumstances and certain amounts of privilege (in this case, fame and fortune) to self-destruct? It’s an endlessly fascinating question to me, and I love the way this film explores it. I also immensely enjoy seeing American stars like Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz in this complicated, dark, serpentine French film. Those are some of my favorite performances by each of the three women. I love films about actresses; they always hit me right where it hurts."

"It’s the first movie I saw when I was a kid, and it’s also my first memory of my life. It’s the first thing I remember. I was three years old — I know that because it was 1978. The first thing I remember in my life is the shot of Christopher Reeve wearing the Superman clothes and flying. That image provoked such an impact on me that from that moment on, I wanted to be Superman. And then as I grew up, I wanted to be the guy who made Superman possible. So I found out that there were these guys called actors and I wanted to be one. I was obsessed with movies when I was a kid. That movie created such an impact on me, and when I watch it again nowadays, I still believe it’s a masterpiece. It established the superhero genre on a level that, I think nowadays there’s not any movie that has it better than that for me, in the genre. The reality of the special effects, the chemistry between Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder is still there. The way Richard Donner recreates Smallville… It’s an endless film to me. It’s an amazing film, especially nowadays."

"As someone who’s really passionate about what he does, I have a lot of opinions about documentary films. A lot of documentary filmmakers don’t really think about their films cinematically, and some documentaries almost seem like they were just copy-and-pasted like Microsoft Word documents. I’ve always loved how Errol Morris takes a wrecking ball to those conventions. His films are constantly exploring the idea of what a documentary is. His films tweak and twist reality, and they don’t just try to serve the audience digested ideas on a platter. If I had to pick a favorite, it’s his transcendent 1988 classic The Thin Blue Line, which recounts a murder case and then riffs and re-riffs on it like a Bach fugue. It was the first film to really use re-creation and reeneactment scenes in a new and highly cinematic way, both to explore a case and to challenge a viewer’s own bias and subjectivity. Nowadays, its approach and editing style loom over every one of these multipart true crime series and podcasts. The Thin Blue Line is almost like the influential band that’s been ripped off so often that new converts may not realize just how significant it is."

"A great, great movie that was unjustly robbed of a lot of the recognition it would have gotten, but it came out in the year of amazing other movies, you know, like Apocalypse Now and a lot of other great stuff. To this date it is the most accurate portrayal of theater folk and what it’s like to produce and be part of theater. As a theater geek all my life, I was hoping that Smash would be like that, and boy it’s not. All That Jazz nailed it, just in terms of the reality of it. But again, it would go off into those fantasies that still totally worked, and worked as incredible dance numbers, but you know, were clearly fantasy numbers inside one of the most realistic portrayals of that subculture that had never been put on screen. It’s f—ing perfect. It’s just f—ing perfect. It’s great because it’s funny, it’s cynical about the theater but also clearly loves the subject matter. You know, I grew up backstage — my parents were actors — and it just captures that world absolutely incredibly accurately. Plus, it’s just a really ballsy, artistic movie from Bob Fosse in that it incorporates a lot of strange stuff, but all of it works."