31 Mar 2025
Rob Delaney’s Closet Picks
The writer, actor, and comedian talks about Harlan County USA and how it captures the power of collective action, praises the incomparable beauty of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , and shares how he was inspired by the complex portrayal of a marriage in Before Midnight.
Rob Delaney: everything they reached for, 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 |  Harlan County USA | Barbara Kopple | 1976 | |
| 2 |  The Umbrellas of Cherbourg | Jacques Demy | 1964 | |
| 3 |  The Before Trilogy box set, 3 films | |||
| 4 |  André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films box set, 3 films |
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 8films run 14.2 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 212.2 minutes of film for each of its 4 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 4 choices had been taken by 5.25 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 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, taken by 2 visits in total.