8 Jan 2025

Brady Corbet’s Closet Picks

The director and cowriter of The Brutalist selects three favorites by Luchino Visconti, praises Larisa Shepitko as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, and talks about the hypnotic, endlessly watchable The Mother and the Whore.

Brady Corbet: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

11

9 single, 2 box sets

single films

9

chosen on their own

box sets

2

one choice, many films

films reached

25

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.

235 The Leopard 1963 962 Death in Venice 1971 1098 The Damned 1969 661 Marketa Lazarová 1967 17 Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom 1976 1063 The Ascent 1977 1170 Bergman Island 2021 1245 The Mother and the Whore 1973 SET World of Wong Kar Wai SET Pasolini 101 837 Dekalog 1988

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	The Leopard	Luchino Visconti	1963	9
2	Death in Venice	Luchino Visconti	1971	3
3	The Damned	Luchino Visconti	1969	5
4	Marketa Lazarová	František Vláčil	1967	1
5	Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom	Pier Paolo Pasolini	1976	11
6	The Ascent	Larisa Shepitko	1977	3
7	Bergman Island	Mia Hansen-Løve	2021	1
8	The Mother and the Whore	Jean Eustache	1973	4
9	World of Wong Kar Wai box set, 7 films			6
10	Pasolini 101 box set, 9 films			13
11	Dekalog	Krzysztof Kieślowski	1988	12

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1963 to 2021, box sets 1961 to 2004

World of Wong Kar Wai

Pasolini 101

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

24 of its 25 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 47.9 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 11 choices had been taken by 6.18 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Two of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Marketa Lazarová, taken by this visit alone.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com