27 Oct 2025
Kathryn Bigelow’s Closet Picks
The writer and director talks about the innovative low-budget filmmaking of Detour, shares her love for The Battle of Algiers and its unrelenting “metronome of tension,” and praises Costa-Gavras as the inventor of the political thriller.
Kathryn Bigelow: 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 |  Detour | Edgar G. Ulmer | 1945 | |
| 2 |  The Battle of Algiers | Gillo Pontecorvo | 1966 | |
| 3 |  Straw Dogs | Sam Peckinpah | 1971 | |
| 4 |  Army of Shadows | Jean-Pierre Melville | 1969 | |
| 5 |  The Confession | Costa-Gavras | 1970 | |
| 6 |  Hiroshima mon amour | Alain Resnais | 1959 | |
| 7 |  Notorious | Alfred Hitchcock | 1946 | |
| 8 |  The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog | Alfred Hitchcock | 1927 |
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 14.6 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 109.5 minutes of film for each of its 8 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 8 choices had been taken by 3.62 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Three of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Hiroshima mon amour, taken by this visit alone.