11 Apr 2025
Paul W. Downs’s Closet Picks
The writer, director, actor, and cocreator of Hacks talks about how Being John Malkovich informed his sense of storytelling, praises Vanya on 42nd Street as one of the best productions of Anton Chekhov’s work, and admires Steven Soderbergh’s unique approach to filmmaking.
Paul W. Downs: 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 |  Election | Alexander Payne | 1999 | |
| 2 |  Being John Malkovich | Spike Jonze | 1999 | |
| 3 |  Vanya on 42nd Street | Louis Malle | 1994 | |
| 4 |  Tootsie | Sydney Pollack | 1982 | |
| 5 |  Traffic | Steven Soderbergh | 2000 |
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 5films run 10 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 119.8 minutes of film for each of its 5 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 5 choices had been taken by 6 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Vanya on 42nd Street, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Alexander Payne, through Election, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.