13 May 2025
Michael Cera’s Closet Picks
The actor returns to the Criterion Closet, where he selects a few movies to watch with his kids, talks about his magical experience viewing Hobson’s Choice, and picks up a new edition of a film by his favorite director, Abbas Kiarostami
Michael Cera: both visits, and whose taste is nearest
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.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  The Complete Jacques Tati box set, 6 films | |||
| 2 |  WALL·E | Andrew Stanton | 2008 | |
| 3 |  Hobson’s Choice | David Lean | 1954 | |
| 4 |  Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy box set, 3 films | |||
| 5 |  The Mother and the Whore | Jean Eustache | 1973 | |
| 6 |  The Wind Will Carry Us | Abbas Kiarostami | 1999 | |
| 7 |  Anora | Sean Baker | 2024 | |
| 8 |  Prince of Broadway | Sean Baker | 2008 | |
| 9 |  8½ | Federico Fellini | 1963 |
How far across film history it reaches
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 16films run 29.4 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 195.8 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 7.11 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was The Wind Will Carry Us, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Andrew Stanton, through WALL·E, Gregg Araki, through Totally F***ed Up, Gregg Araki, through The Doom Generation, Gregg Araki, through Nowhere, Sean Baker, through Prince of Broadway and Sean Baker, through Anora, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.