6 Feb 2025

Amy Irving’s Closet Picks

The actor and star of Crossing Delancey reminisces about the first film her family watched together at the drive-in, praises the depth of Liv Ullmann’s performance in Cries and Whispers, and shares her intimate connections to Blue Velvet and Days of Heaven.

Amy Irving: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

9

8 single, 1 box set

single films

8

chosen on their own

box sets

1

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.

1027 The Great Escape 1963 977 Blue Velvet 1986 101 Cries and Whispers 1972 691 Thief 1981 409 Days of Heaven 1978 SET The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher 1250 Crossing Delancey 1988 216 The Rules of the Game 1939 1010 Le petit soldat 1963

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	The Great Escape	John Sturges	1963	6
2	Blue Velvet	David Lynch	1986	10
3	Cries and Whispers	Ingmar Bergman	1972	2
4	Thief	Michael Mann	1981	4
5	Days of Heaven	Terrence Malick	1978	5
6	The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher box set, 5 films			5
7	Crossing Delancey	Joan Micklin Silver	1988	2
8	The Rules of the Game	Jean Renoir	1939	6
9	Le petit soldat	Jean-Luc Godard	1963	2

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1939 to 1988, box sets 1957 to 1960

The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher

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

Its 13films run 21.4 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 142.4 minutes of film for each of its 9 choices, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 375 visits with a complete total, the median is 136.4 minutes.

How unusual this haul was

Its 9 choices had been taken by 4.67 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 Cries and Whispers, taken by 2 visits in total.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com