Closet Picks

2 Dec 2024

Denis Villeneuve’s Closet Picks

The director and cowriter of Dune draws connections between the ways Krzysztof Kieślowski and Ingmar Bergman captured women on-screen, shares why Che is his favorite Steven Soderbergh film, and talks about how Lars von Trier broke the codes of cinema with Europa .

Denis Villeneuve: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices
7
4 single, 3 box sets
single films
4
chosen on their own
box sets
3
one choice, many films
films reached
13
the same visit, box sets opened

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.

single film, with its spine number box set
Chose Director Year Taken by
1 Three Colors box set, 3 films
9
2 A Film Trilogy by Ingmar Bergman box set, 3 films
5
3 Che Steven Soderbergh 2008
2
4 The Wages of Fear Henri-Georges Clouzot 1953
7
5 Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy box set, 3 films
2
6 Fellini Satyricon Federico Fellini 1969
2
7 Seven Samurai Akira Kurosawa 1954
10

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1953 to 2008, box sets 1961 to 1994
Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy
A Film Trilogy by Ingmar Bergman
Three Colors
a single film, at its year a box set, across the years of its films the collection, by decade

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

12 of its 13 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 22.8 hours. The other one is unmatched, so the real figure is higher. 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 7 choices had been taken by 5.29 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy, taken by 2 visits in total.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com