"I love soulful noirs, and this slow-burn Austrian crime thriller is one of my faves of the new millennium. It’s as if Bergman made a movie about cops and robbers. Austrian director Götz Spielmann gets incredible naturalistic performances, and the storytelling has some real breathing space, which is rare in crime thrillers. (For another soulful Criterion crime pic, give The Hit a look-see.) What I love most about Revanche is this narrative magic trick it pulls. You think it’s going to be a relatively conventional story about a robbery that goes off the rails and criminal-code revenge. But instead it turns into this deep exploration about the intersection of people and the happenstances that lead us down surprising paths in our lives (a theme that I explored in my documentary Magical Universe. Find it!). Like the best noirs, the crime plot is just the Trojan horse that takes you into a profound story about choice and consequence. Before you even know it, Revanche has morphed into something like a Kieślowski film, and it suddenly knocks you on the floor and leaves you in a heap."

"I spent the summer of 2002 in Los Angeles, interning for my uncle’s company. I rented a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture. Other than my inflatable mattress in the corner (which sprang a leak right away), it was just a big empty space. I had a suitcase, a guitar, and a laptop with me. I had no television and a superslow Internet connection, so watching DVDs on my laptop was my only source of entertainment. I happened to rent both of these films that summer, and they are still two of my favorites. The sloppiness and raw energy of The Harder They Come was so inspiring. Two-Lane Blacktop also had a great energy about it, but in a more deliberate, quiet way. Both films were convincing arguments for casting musicians as leads, regardless of their acting experience, which I have done several times and plan to continue doing. Most importantly, the films couldn’t be shaken. They crept into me and wouldn’t go away. My initial reaction to something is far less important to me than my feeling about it a month or a year later. These two are still with me."

"I spent the summer of 2002 in Los Angeles, interning for my uncle’s company. I rented a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture. Other than my inflatable mattress in the corner (which sprang a leak right away), it was just a big empty space. I had a suitcase, a guitar, and a laptop with me. I had no television and a superslow Internet connection, so watching DVDs on my laptop was my only source of entertainment. I happened to rent both of these films that summer, and they are still two of my favorites. The sloppiness and raw energy of The Harder They Come was so inspiring. Two-Lane Blacktop also had a great energy about it, but in a more deliberate, quiet way. Both films were convincing arguments for casting musicians as leads, regardless of their acting experience, which I have done several times and plan to continue doing. Most importantly, the films couldn’t be shaken. They crept into me and wouldn’t go away. My initial reaction to something is far less important to me than my feeling about it a month or a year later. These two are still with me."

"I was obsessed with this record from the first time I heard it. Everything about Joe Meek's story is fascinating. The way he worked, the way he lived. As a producer, he turned down the Beatles, saying "The Merseybeat sound is going nowhere." This record was made in 1960 and it's berserk. It captures a time when space exploration was an international agenda. 'Telstar' had captured the mood when the first satellites went up; this record went a lot further, imagining an entire planet beyond our solar system. It's an artist you know doing a record that's so far from what you thought they were capable of: "Really, this is the same person?" I just got obsessed with it. I only had a taped version of it which, to me, isn't like actually having the record. I was in Japan a few years later, before it was reissued, and I found a bootleg copy there at great expense. It's almost like an early hauntological recording; it's very crude but incredibly evocative. It's interesting to wonder what would have happened to Joe Meek had his story turned out differently…"