20 Oct 2025
Benny Safdie’s Closet Picks
The writer, director, and actor returns to the Criterion Closet, where he shares how he and cinematographer Maceo Bishop studied documentaries like The War Room when making their new film The Smashing Machine, shouts out the singular performances in Carnal Knowledge, and talks about watching Flow with his kids and their cat.
Benny Safdie: 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 Princess Bride | Rob Reiner | 1987 | |
| 2 |  The War Room | Chris Hegedus, D. A. Pennebaker | 1993 | |
| 3 |  When We Were Kings | Leon Gast | 1996 | |
| 4 |  Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy box set, 3 films | |||
| 5 |  Carnal Knowledge | Mike Nichols | 1971 | |
| 6 |  Flow | Gints Zilbalodis | 2024 | |
| 7 |  The Red Balloon and Other Stories: Five Films by Albert Lamorisse box set, 5 films | |||
| 8 |  Husbands | John Cassavetes | 1970 | |
| 9 |  The Great Escape | John Sturges | 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 15films run 24 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 160.3 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 4.11 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was When We Were Kings, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Gints Zilbalodis, through Flow, Wim Wenders, through Alice in the Cities, Wim Wenders, through Kings of the Road and Wim Wenders, through Wrong Move, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.