11 Nov 2025

David Remnick’s Closet Picks

The editor of the New Yorker feels honored by the tribute to the magazine in The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, urges patience to appreciate Stan Brakhage’s experimental cinema, and finds parallels between the experiences of watching Robert Bresson’s films and listening to Bach.

David Remnick: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

9

7 single, 2 box sets

single films

7

chosen on their own

box sets

2

one choice, many films

films reached

18

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.

650 A Man Escaped 1956 1104 Citizen Kane 1941 1265 Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser 1988 287 Burden of Dreams 1982 315 Shoot the Piano Player 1960 SET By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two 1249 King Lear 1987 SET The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years 1282 The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun 2021

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	A Man Escaped	Robert Bresson	1956	8
2	Citizen Kane	Orson Welles	1941	7
3	Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser	Charlotte Zwerin	1988	3
4	Burden of Dreams	Les Blank	1982	5
5	Shoot the Piano Player	François Truffaut	1960	1
6	By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two box set, 2 films			3
7	King Lear	Jean-Luc Godard	1987	2
8	The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years box set, 10 films			7
9	The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun	Wes Anderson	2021	1

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1941 to 2021, box sets 1996 to 2021

The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years

a single film, at its year a box set, across the years of its films the collection, by decade

1 of the choices is not on the axis: By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two (no year on record for its films). Left off rather than placed at a guessed year.

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 18films run 37.9 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 252.7 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. Two of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Shoot the Piano Player, taken by this visit alone.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com