Writer Hunter Harris comes to 7 Ludlow on January 13 to present two of her selects, Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Spike Lee’s Inside Man. 

“The original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, one of the most iconic movies about New York City, and Spike Lee’s big-budget cop thriller, Inside Man: maybe I just have the same taste in movies as a divorced father of two, or whoever’s programming midday movies on TNT. (My other ideas were The Departed and Frances Ha—both movies about friendship, when you really think about it.)

“These are movies about cops and criminals, movies that make me root for the good guys and bad guys in equal measure. There’s an engine in both, a real momentum that I can’t resist. They are deft crowd-pleasers with sly tricks. Both let a cop and a criminal collide, and then let us decide who comes out the victor; civil bureaucracy, particularly in New York, is its own hermetically sealed subculture. The final bemused smile from Walter Matthau! The year Clive Owen was Spike Lee’s white boy of the month! I’m drawn to the duality there, that maybe, on a different day, both pairs of cops and robbers could have traded places. These are big, raucous movies bursting at the seams with noise and action and life. I never get tired of watching them.”—Hunter Harris