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.”

“Notorious. Incredible cover art by the way. 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... And you zoom in... All the way into her hand.”

“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. 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. Jane Fonda is not a shrinking violet. Her performances always evoke a kind of strength.”

“Barry freakin’ Lyndon. Now, I remember when I was growing up my mom talking about Barry Lyndon. We were a big Kubrick House. Barry Lyndon has rightly had a critical reevaluation in the last decades. 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.”

“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. At the outset of the story, you have this depiction of a family that’s full of foible and flaw. And then you have this stark contrast of this very ascetic imprisonment that happens for the mom and the kids. It’s horrifying. I love Fanny and Alexander.”