Ronan Farrow

“Brazil is a real favorite of mine. Everything about it. The art direction is so lush. It’s obviously influenced so many things that you see, so many modern meditations on bureaucracy and Orwellian themes. The latest edition is a beautiful 4K restoration, which I just got and watched, and it’s… real chef’s kiss stuff. The extra features disc has this awesome documentary from the ’90s on the whole epic fight over this movie. The studio wanted to gut it and recut it and give it a happy ending, which for anyone who knows the movie is hilarious. So, great movie, and the extra features make for a great double billing.”

“Notorious. Incredible cover art by the way. Looks like a photo, looks like a still from the film. It’s not. It’s an original piece of pencil art that’s photorealistic, and the composition is so awesome and references this moment in the film where, for me, just evoking it, seeing the art, gives me chills. I don’t think there’s a movie for me that is a more perfectly tuned Rube Goldberg machine of tension. The party scene in Notorious, in particular, where you start out with this crane shot from a balcony, which he actually had to build a whole custom rig to get up that high and go that far, and you zoom in from this very, very wide shot of Ingrid Bergman in a crowd, all the way into this micro shot of her hand, fidgeting nervously and holding a key. And the fact that it’s a single, continuous take really makes you feel the contrast, that she is an isolated figure, completely alone, fending for herself in a really dangerous situation. So I think it’s a very cool, very ahead-of-its-time movie. And the Criterion edition is awesome.”

“All right, up next, we’ve got some Pakula, one of my favorites: Klute. So when I was writing one of my books, Catch and Kill, which is very much a real life set of events that involved surveillance and paranoia, I watched and thought about the screenplay to Klute a lot, and I thought about Pakula’s direction a lot. I wanted to, in the writing, actually evoke what it’s like to be followed in a way that I think this movie does completely brilliantly. Works really well as a double billing with Rosemary’s Baby, which is a great Criterion edition that’s currently out of print. Here’s my little lobbying for Criterion to get that back in the catalogue. Because they’re both pieces about women being watched, very much a continuation of some of those themes in Notorious. Women being watched, women being gaslit, women being disbelieved. Jane Fonda is not a shrinking violet. Her performances always evoke a kind of strength. But she does a real tightrope walk in this, of being so strong and smart and capable, but also so vulnerable. And she’s playing a sex worker, so there’s this extra layer of people not believing her, of her not having social capital, of her being alone with a system that doesn’t give her any purchase.”

“Barry freakin’ Lyndon. Now, I remember when I was growing up my mom talking about Barry Lyndon. We were a big Kubrick house. Here’s the thing: Barry Lyndon has rightly had a critical reevaluation in the last decades, a lot of prominent directors have cited it as their favorite Kubrick, and for a modern audience that really has a modern sense of irony, this movie has aged so well. I feel like watch Succession and then watch Barry Lyndon, because they’re both pieces about, again, an oppressive system, in this case, the aristocracy and the super rich, and the rot in those systems. So, it is as gorgeous as everyone says, but it’s also loads of fun. It’s actually so fun that, even though I recently watched Barry Lyndon, like in the last six months, I think I could do Barry Lyndon again.”

“This is probably the most important, for me personally, of these films. Fanny and Alexander, the movie or TV series. This set includes both. Bergman’s favorite version was the five-ish hour TV cut, which is really rewarding and I recommend, but they’re both great. And at the outset of the story, you have this depiction of a family that’s full of foible and flaw, and, you know, there’s infidelity and there’s drunkenness. Everyone’s a bit of a mess. But you love them. And then you have this stark contrast of this very ascetic imprisonment that happens for the mom and the kids. And it’s horrifying, and you want them to resist and escape so much. And the way that they do, which then veers into magical realism, is so cool. For me, maybe just because it resonated so much going back to my childhood, I think it’s my favorite. I love Persona, I love a lot of Bergman stuff, but this one is so vivid and so personal. You really feel that. I cannot say enough about how much I love Fanny and Alexander. And I’m really happy to have this set.”