8 May 2025

Natasha Lyonne’s Closet Picks

The actor, producer, writer, and director shares why she thinks Naked is best watched alone, discusses her favorite cinematographer James Wong Howe’s work on Sweet Smell of Success , and suggests a Bob Fosse and Richard Pryor double feature.

Natasha Lyonne: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

20

17 single, 3 box sets

single films

17

chosen on their own

box sets

3

one choice, many films

films reached

29

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	Naked	Mike Leigh	1993	14
2	Hoop Dreams	Steve James	1994	5
3	Heaven Can Wait	Ernst Lubitsch	1943	5
4	La strada	Federico Fellini	1954	16
5	Naked Lunch	David Cronenberg	1991	6
6	Umberto D.	Vittorio De Sica	1952	5
7	Uncut Gems	Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie	2019	6
8	Devil in a Blue Dress	Carl Franklin	1995	7
9	Raging Bull	Martin Scorsese	1980	8
10	Town Bloody Hall	Chris Hegedus, D. A. Pennebaker	1979	3
11	Pickpocket	Robert Bresson	1959	9
12	Trilogy of Life box set, 3 films			7
13	Sunday Bloody Sunday	John Schlesinger	1971	7
14	3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman box set, 3 films			9
15	City Lights	Charles Chaplin	1931	10
16	Pandora’s Box	G. W. Pabst	1929	2
17	Six Moral Tales box set, 6 films			10
18	Sweet Smell of Success	Alexander Mackendrick	1957	9
19	Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling	Richard Pryor	1986	5
20	All That Jazz	Bob Fosse	1979	18

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1929 to 2019, box sets 1950 to 1974

Six Moral Tales

3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman

Trilogy of Life

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 29films run 51 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 153 minutes of film for each of its 20 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 20 choices had been taken by 8.05 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 Pandora’s Box, taken by 2 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of Benny Safdie, through Uncut Gems, Carl Franklin, through Devil in a Blue Dress, David Cronenberg, through Naked Lunch, Josh Safdie, through Uncut Gems and Mike Leigh, through Naked, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com