Props for picking The Ride, one of my favorites.

The Sopranos is my favorite show, but I've always thought the first season was by far the weakest, and I never understood the appeal of this episode either. It's very good, but one of the greatest? Eh. Everything's so much less subtle and more hamfisted and cliched in the early episodes of the show, compared to S2 or…

I haven't watched Hannibal yet, so every time I see a mention of, say, Will Graham, or Dollarhyde, I just immediately get images of Mann's awesome film in my head (accompanied, of course, by the triumphant strains of "Graham's Theme" by Michel Rubini: https://www.youtube.com/wat….

It's Go Go Tales, but I think it played at a few places, festivals probably, though maybe not for a few years after its initial release in 2007. Another Ferrara/Dafoe flick, 2011's 4:44: Last Day on Earth was basically Ferrara's first film since The Funeral in 1996 (!) to actually get a proper release in the US.…

It's sad that our greatest living filmmaker has to go to Kickstarter for funding now, but oh well. While I haven't been crazy about any of Ferrara's post-2001 films, I'm still always eager to see what the guy comes up with. And yeah, if I was rich I think I'd pay a ridiculous amount of money just to ask him a question…

Yeah, Prince of the City is pretty much the best cop movie ever, as well as a precursor to The Wire in its theme, worldview and realistic approach. That's why, to me, Serpico is such a mediocre movie; it's a typical good vs. bad Hollywood tale where Pacino is pretty much a perfect hero, whereas Prince bathes in moral…

What are you referring to?

What are you referring to?

The biker stuff is all pretty generic and cliche'd but the rest of this episode is indeed fantastic.

The biker stuff is all pretty generic and cliche'd but the rest of this episode is indeed fantastic.

There may even be a direct homage, when Gabe shoots at the man in the car, to the chilling scene in the film where Sheen locks two strangers in a storm cellar, fires off a shot through the door, and then runs away without him or us ever knowing if he actually hit them.

There may even be a direct homage, when Gabe shoots at the man in the car, to the chilling scene in the film where Sheen locks two strangers in a storm cellar, fires off a shot through the door, and then runs away without him or us ever knowing if he actually hit them.

I remember finding the Hoyt scene shocking and very powerful the first time around, but with hindsight and another viewing I really don't like how rushed the whole revelation feels. They should have either developed the Hoyt-Lisa thread better, or just left Lisa's fate a mystery.

One of my favorite episodes. I know Season 4 is much-maligned, but it's one of my favorites. It's certainly the darkest, and this episode (despite its hopefulness in the end) is very emblematic of the kind of sense of dread that permeates the whole season; that elevator death is grueling, and I feel like overall the…

I guess I was thinking just endings in general, though with most of my picks the final shot is almost as worthy of praise as is The Third Man's. I really need to see more Wilder; Sunset Blvd. is the only one I've watched, and I really liked it. Double Indemnity looks awesome.

It's funny how that's an accident, because it fits so perfectly as a closing touch to the film. It's a very noir gesture — a kind of existential shoulder-shrugging as one apathetically accepts the rotten state of the world (c.f. Chinatown, The Killing, a million others).

Absolutely one of the greatest films, with probably one of the 5 or so greatest endings ever (My other picks? The Passenger, Fire Walk With Me, Barry Lyndon, Heat, Chinatown…) On a related note, I was watching The Departed recently and noticed what must be a nod to that final shot — it's in the penultimate scene at…

As much as I love the Verve, I'm fine that they disbanded. They had been heading in a progressively less interesting direction with each album (though Northern Soul is still great, Urban Hymns is very patchy and quite bland at worst), and clearly their best work was behind them — A Storm in Heaven, Voyager 1 and Verve…

The film remains pretty obscure (especially to the average viewer); but I've noticed that those in the UK especially seem to have re-evaluated it as a masterpiece, probably because it screened there a lot in 2011.

It used to be (that's how I first saw it), but not anymore… There's an old DVD out by MGM that's decent; not very good picture quality but hardly unwatchable. And apparently Twilight Time is going to release it on Blu sometime in the next year-ish.