19 Oct 2025

Tracy Letts’s Closet Picks

The playwright and actor praises Do the Right Thing as the best film of the eighties, talks about the comfort of watching his favorite westerns , and selects Chicago cinema classics like Hoop Dreams and l ove jones.

Tracy Letts: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

12

11 single, 1 box set

single films

11

chosen on their own

box sets

1

one choice, many films

films reached

16

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.

90 Kwaidan 1965 97 Do the Right Thing 1989 289 Hoop Dreams 1994 411 Berlin Alexanderplatz 1980 1248 Winchester ’73 1950 709 Red River 1948 SET The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher 1122 ’Round Midnight 1986 1265 Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser 1988 1256 Choose Me 1984 1117 love jones 1997 322 The Complete Mr. Arkadin 1955

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Kwaidan	Masaki Kobayashi	1965	3
2	Do the Right Thing	Spike Lee	1989	20
3	Hoop Dreams	Steve James	1994	5
4	Berlin Alexanderplatz	Rainer Werner Fassbinder	1980	6
5	Winchester ’73	Anthony Mann	1950	3
6	Red River	Howard Hawks	1948	2
7	The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher box set, 5 films			5
8	’Round Midnight	Bertrand Tavernier	1986	7
9	Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser	Charlotte Zwerin	1988	3
10	Choose Me	Alan Rudolph	1984	1
11	love jones	Theodore Witcher	1997	5
12	The Complete Mr. Arkadin	Orson Welles	1955	2

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1948 to 1997, box sets 1957 to 1960

The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher

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

14 of its 16 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 25.4 hours. One of the others is a television series, which has no total on record at all: TMDB gives one episode's length, not a series'. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

What one of its choices was worth is not published for this visit. That figure divides the whole runtime by every choice, so a total missing two films would understate it rather than be approximately right.

How unusual this haul was

Its 12 choices had been taken by 5.17 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Choose Me, taken by this visit alone.

This visit reached the work of Theodore Witcher, through love jones, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com