18 Jul 2025
Tom Rothman’s Closet Picks
The CEO and chairman of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group fondly reminisces about working with Jim Jarmusch early in his career, shares why Harlan County USA remains one of the most important documentaries of all time, and celebrates the independent spirit of Charles Burnett.
Tom Rothman: 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 |  Down by Law | Jim Jarmusch | 1986 | |
| 2 |  To Be or Not to Be | Ernst Lubitsch | 1942 | |
| 3 |  Harlan County USA | Barbara Kopple | 1976 | |
| 4 |  Winchester ’73 | Anthony Mann | 1950 | |
| 5 |  To Sleep with Anger | Charles Burnett | 1990 | |
| 6 |  The Ice Storm | Ang Lee | 1997 | |
| 7 |  The Big Chill | Lawrence Kasdan | 1983 | |
| 8 |  The Philadelphia Story | George Cukor | 1940 |
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 13.9 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 104.2 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 7.12 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Winchester ’73, taken by 3 visits in total.
This visit reached the work of Charles Burnett, through To Sleep with Anger and Jim Jarmusch, through Down by Law, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.