I’m a 43 year old psychologist, I live in San Francisco with my husband (we got married before prop 8 kicked in) and elderly cat and I have more favorite films than I can count. Here’s some in no particular order:

Rules of the Game, Celine and Julie Go Boating, Jeanne Diehlmann, Vertigo, Madame De…, Marnie, Golden Coach, Voyage in Italy, Europa ‘51, Stromboli, Fear, Germany Year Zero, India, Sansho the Bailiff, Sisters of the Gion, Ugetsu Monogatari, Tabu, Playtime, Ivan the Terrible, M, Good Men, Good Women, A Day in the Country, Ordet, Gertrud, Day of Wrath, Vampyr, Passion of Joan of Arc, Touch of Evil, Magnificent Ambersons, Othello (the Welles version), The House is Black, The Wind Will Carry Us, L’Eclisse, The Passenger, Cries and Whispers, Persona, Night of the Hunter, Imitation of Life, Flowers of Shanghai, Devil is a Woman, Scarlet Empress, Trouble in Paradise, Lady Eve, Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Ruggles of Red Gap, Make Way for Tomorrow, Late Spring, Boy, Andrei Rublev, L’Argent, Au Hasard Balthazar, A Man Escapes, Made in USA, Contempt, Beyond the Forest, 8 1/2, Nights of Cabiria, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, Spirit of the Beehive, Mirror, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Angelface, Bonjour Tristesse, Anatomy of a Murder, I Walked with a Zombie, Out of the Blue, The Battle of Algiers, The Letter Never Sent, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Detour, Mildred Pierce, Rebecca, Weekend, Dottie Gets Spanked, Safe, Written on the Wind, My Only Son, The General Line, Umberto D, Forty Guns, White Dog, Arabian Nights, Teorema, La Ricotta, Flowers of St. Francis, Rise to Power of Louis XIV, Toby Dammit, Muriel, Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Leopard, To Have and Have Not, My Darling Clementine, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Reckless Moment, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, The River, The Apu Trilogy and many many others.

I also read voraciously and have as many favorite authors as directors: Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Iris Murdoch, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Paul Bowles, Julio Cortazar, le Carre, E.F. Benson, Kenzaburo Oe, Doris Lessing, Alan Furst, J.M. Coetzee, Flannery O’Connor, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Faulkner, Melville, Stendhal, Henry James, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, Janet Malcolm and Javiar Marias are among my favorites. I also have a particular fondness for spy novels and old style murder mysteries, especially of the locked room variety.