"I first saw this on a ghostly, fifth-generation Betamax bootleg bought from a record fair in Glasgow in the early 1980s (the same way I first watched Eat the Document, A Clockwork Orange, and the films of the Sex Pistols’s U.S. tour). As much as the bleached-out, mysteriously forbidden images on my copy of this film had a degraded beauty all their own, seeing and hearing the film now in its full glory is a thing of joy."

"In film school, I took a critical-studies course on Bresson. He's a filmmaker I'm certain I would never have experienced if I hadn't been forced to. And I really fell in love. This is my favorite of his films. There's a distance in his filmmaking, an artifice in his staging, that makes it feel mythic. This story felt so familiar to me, like it echoed my own teenage experience of being a girl, the terror of sex, puberty, love, industrialization, cultural apathy."

"It was hard to choose one Antonioni film, but Red Desert feels like the perfect summation of Antonioni’s work. Antonioni used color for the first time in order to show psychological imbalance and subjectivity. He depicted the modern alienation surrounding the industrial fog that’s imposed upon our lives in urban environments, and he shows how these forces can threaten our sanity. The film also has the most freakishly uncomfortable sex scene, which turns an entire room pink. Only Monica Vitti has that power"

"My favorite French film of this century that wasn’t directed by Gasper Noé. Even though it’s mainly infamous for its three very explicit sex scenes, this is really an intense love story—girl meets girl, girl loses girl—and completely heart-wrenching at times. It’s three-hour length flies by. I easily could have watched another three hours of these absolutely incredible performances. I can’t wait to see what Adèle does next. I could not take my eyes off of her."

"Want a thousand pages of pure romantic anxiety in which the biggest war in our nation’s history is just a mere backdrop for the heartache of a woman who should probably be in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous? Then this is the book for you! I loved the descriptions of food when I was younger, and also of fashion and French kissing, and it’s a real master class in plot, pacing and how to sew a dress out of window decorations!"