"I’m an absolute lover of The Wizard of Oz. I adore that film from start to finish. It never gets old. I think it has a beautiful, tender tone of both real drama and huge comedy, and I adore it. I don’t remember the first time [I saw it]; it’s part of my brain. I mean, I saw that film along with The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins. I still watch it every couple of years, and it brings me great joy every single time. I love Bert Lahr [as the Cowardly Lion], and his performance really gets me where I live. When they go to meet the Wizard and he’s doing his big speech and he says, “I just want you guys to do one thing….” – I’m butchering this! – and he goes, “Talk me out of it,” because he didn’t want to go in… I adore that moment in the film, as well as countless others."

"I don’t really understand Ozu, and I probably never will, but if this is what not understanding feels like, I’m okay with that. It’s hard to single out a movie, because so much of the impact of Ozu’s films has to do with their cumulative relationship with each other, so I chose three by gut: Late Spring, because the shot of Chishu Ryu peeling the apple is the peak of all of Ozu and maybe all of movies. There Was a Father struck me as (deceptively) subversive for a film made during the war, and its central father-son relationship is especially tender. Good Morning, a sort-of remake of Ozu’s own I Was Born, But . . ., is very funny, and a good reminder of his wonderful schoolboy sense of humor. (I remember reading or hearing someone observe that the farts in Good Morning don’t really sound like farts but more like the refined Platonic ideal of farts."

"I don’t really understand Ozu, and I probably never will, but if this is what not understanding feels like, I’m okay with that. It’s hard to single out a movie, because so much of the impact of Ozu’s films has to do with their cumulative relationship with each other, so I chose three by gut: Late Spring, because the shot of Chishu Ryu peeling the apple is the peak of all of Ozu and maybe all of movies. There Was a Father struck me as (deceptively) subversive for a film made during the war, and its central father-son relationship is especially tender. Good Morning, a sort-of remake of Ozu’s own I Was Born, But . . ., is very funny, and a good reminder of his wonderful schoolboy sense of humor. (I remember reading or hearing someone observe that the farts in Good Morning don’t really sound like farts but more like the refined Platonic ideal of farts."

"I don’t really understand Ozu, and I probably never will, but if this is what not understanding feels like, I’m okay with that. It’s hard to single out a movie, because so much of the impact of Ozu’s films has to do with their cumulative relationship with each other, so I chose three by gut: Late Spring, because the shot of Chishu Ryu peeling the apple is the peak of all of Ozu and maybe all of movies. There Was a Father struck me as (deceptively) subversive for a film made during the war, and its central father-son relationship is especially tender. Good Morning, a sort-of remake of Ozu’s own I Was Born, But . . ., is very funny, and a good reminder of his wonderful schoolboy sense of humor. (I remember reading or hearing someone observe that the farts in Good Morning don’t really sound like farts but more like the refined Platonic ideal of farts."