Jane Schoenbrun

“Bamboozled, probably the best movie about television ever made.”

“Spike Lee double feature. Malcolm X, best biopic ever made.”

“Víctor Erice's El Sur. Second film, maybe not as well known as his first film, which is equally beautiful, The Spirit of the Beehive. Honestly, every film he's ever made is one of the best films in cinema history. This film is gorgeous. Along with Spirit of the Beehive, these two movies taught me how to film people watching, which is such a huge part of my own cinematic language.”

“Peeping Tom. When I was working on I Saw the TV Glow, a lot of people told me that I was sort of operating against like a century of film history where kind of like the protagonist being a loner, not able to look you in the eye, weird guy. And in fact, in my film, that character acts this way, I'd say risking spoilers, because of queerness. And so revisiting these films and thinking about them through the lens of queerness is always something that I'm really interested in.”

“Werckmeister Harmonies. I watch Béla Tarr films when I have the flu, because they make you feel bad in the way that having the flu makes you feel bad. And sometimes when you're feeling bad, turning on a movie that's going to just meet you right there is about all you can ask for.”

“My dear friend Angel asked me to get them Autumn Sonata. Angel's my queer fam, family. I spend most nights at Angel's house watching movies on their couch, and I told them I was going to bring them home a Criterion that we could all watch, and so here is Autumn Sonata for Angel.”

“Wes, hey, it's me, it's Jane. The Grand Budapest Hotel, maybe becoming my favorite Wes Anderson movie. I was obsessed with Wes Anderson in high school, and then I had like 10 years where I was like, you know, I've got I've got like much snobbier taste than that. And then I'd say in the past 5, 10 years, I've just like fallen way back in love with the man. I don't think there are any American filmmakers out there who are building their own language and have been doing it for as long as he has and as beautifully as he has. And I feel like this is the movie where his style becomes moves from like maybe early to late or mid. It's just like he starts becoming obsessed with like nesting doll storytelling, and he starts building these like increasingly complex devices in his filmmaking, until the film itself is almost this like hyper elaborate and beautiful like nesting doll of a world.”

“I like thinking about David Lynch before he was David Lynch, when he was just some dude in a warehouse or wherever the fuck he filmed this, you know, using all of his savings and essentially abandoning his family to make a movie that at the time I can't imagine that too many people understood. Filmmaking is an act of faith, and I think it's like beautiful to imagine, you know, someone like Lynch before he was the brand David Lynch putting it all on the line to make something as insane as his first feature film, Eraserhead.”

“Got to go for the box sets. I've wanted this forever. I love Jacques Tati, and honestly, like I love him. I feel like the more I make films, the more I am like just like in love with any film that feels like it was just like sculpted as its own universe. I rewatched PlayTime recently, and it's just like it's almost like a music video before music videos existed. It's so ambitious and so gorgeous. So I'm very happy to have now my Complete Tati.”