26 Nov 2025
Nicholas Britell’s Closet Picks
The composer reflects on his profound experience working on Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad, praises favorite scores by Bernard Herrmann and Zbigniew Preisner, and shares why La Jetée inspires him to think about cinema’s infinite possibilities.
Nicholas Britell: 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 |  The Underground Railroad | Barry Jenkins | 2021 | |
| 2 |  Citizen Kane | Orson Welles | 1941 | |
| 3 |  The Double Life of Véronique | Krzysztof Kieślowski | 1991 | |
| 4 |  Tokyo Olympiad | Kon Ichikawa | 1965 | |
| 5 |  La Jetée/Sans Soleil box set, 2 films | |||
| 6 |  Malcolm X | Spike Lee | 1992 |
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
6 of its 7 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 12 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 one film would understate it rather than be approximately right.
How unusual this haul was
Its 6 choices had been taken by 5.83 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 The Underground Railroad, taken by 2 visits in total.
This visit reached the work of Barry Jenkins, through The Underground Railroad, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.