4 Dec 2024
Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes’s Closet Picks
The celebrated actors and costars of The Return recommend favorites to each other, share their love for Andrei Tarkovsky and Orson Welles, and discover such Eclipse box sets as The First Films of Samuel Fuller and Basil Dearden’s London Underground.
Filmed together, each with a page of their own: Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes
Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com
This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Down by Law | Jim Jarmusch | 1986 | |
| 2 |  The Magnificent Ambersons | Orson Welles | 1942 | |
| 3 |  Amores perros | Alejandro G. Iñárritu | 2000 | |
| 4 |  Essential Fellini box set, 14 films | |||
| 5 |  Pasolini 101 box set, 9 films | |||
| 6 |  Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa box set, 4 films | |||
| 7 |  Eclipse Series 3: Late Ozu box set, 5 films | |||
| 8 |  Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller box set, 3 films | |||
| 9 |  Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle box set, 7 films | |||
| 10 |  Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse box set, 5 films | |||
| 11 |  Eclipse Series 25: Basil Dearden’s London Underground box set, 4 films | |||
| 12 |  The Furies | Anthony Mann | 1950 | |
| 13 |  Au hasard Balthazar | Robert Bresson | 1966 | |
| 14 |  Mirror | Andrei Tarkovsky | 1975 |
How far across film history it reaches
The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.
How long this haul is
56 of its 57 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 95.2 hours. One of the others is a television series, which has no total on record at all: TMDB gives one episode's length, not a series'. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
What one of its choices was worth is not published for this visit. That figure divides the whole runtime by every choice, so a total missing one film would understate it rather than be approximately right.
How unusual this haul was
Its 14 choices had been taken by 6.29 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Three of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Jim Jarmusch, through Down by Law and Jim Jarmusch, through Down by Law, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.