21 Mar 2025

Mark Rylance’s Closet Picks

The actor talks about feeling immersed in The Tree of Wooden Clogs, praises Small Axe as an “extraordinary piece of work,” and suggests that all film lovers see every film by Akira Kurosawa.

Mark Rylance: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

10

9 single, 1 box set

single films

9

chosen on their own

box sets

1

one choice, many films

films reached

14

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.

116 The Hidden Fortress 1958 221 Ikiru 1952 1119 Miracle in Milan 1951 854 The Tree of Wooden Clogs 1978 SET Small Axe 1099 High Sierra 1941 465 Dodes’ka-den 1970 475 The Friends of Eddie Coyle 1973 394 Woman in the Dunes 1964 1089 After Life 1998

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	The Hidden Fortress	Akira Kurosawa	1958	2
2	Ikiru	Akira Kurosawa	1952	6
3	Miracle in Milan	Vittorio De Sica	1951	2
4	The Tree of Wooden Clogs	Ermanno Olmi	1978	3
5	Small Axe box set, 5 films			2
6	High Sierra	Raoul Walsh	1941	1
7	Dodes’ka-den	Akira Kurosawa	1970	2
8	The Friends of Eddie Coyle	Peter Yates	1973	4
9	Woman in the Dunes	Hiroshi Teshigahara	1964	6
10	After Life	Hirokazu Kore-eda	1998	7

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1941 to 1998, box sets 2020 to 2020

Small Axe

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 14films run 26.3 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 157.9 minutes of film for each of its 10 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 10 choices had been taken by 3.5 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was High Sierra, taken by this visit alone.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com