1 Oct 2025

Mary Bronstein’s Closet Picks

The writer and director selects a pair of feminist films by Dorothy Arzner, shares why Chantal Akerman and David Lynch are her filmmaking idols, and praises how Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales portray complex dynamics between women and men.

Mary Bronstein: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

8

6 single, 2 box sets

single films

6

chosen on their own

box sets

2

one choice, many films

films reached

21

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.

1028 Dance, Girl, Dance 1940 1076 Merrily We Go to Hell 1932 1137 Frownland 2007 SET Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 1175 Inland Empire 2006 12 This Is Spinal Tap 1984 SET Six Moral Tales 692 It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 1963

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Dance, Girl, Dance	Dorothy Arzner	1940	4
2	Merrily We Go to Hell	Dorothy Arzner	1932	2
3	Frownland	Ronald Bronstein	2007	2
4	Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 box set, 9 films			5
5	Inland Empire	David Lynch	2006	4
6	This Is Spinal Tap	Rob Reiner	1984	3
7	Six Moral Tales box set, 6 films			10
8	It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World	Stanley Kramer	1963	3

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1932 to 2007, box sets 1963 to 1978

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Six Moral Tales

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

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 21films run 31.3 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 234.5 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 4.12 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 Frownland, taken by 2 visits in total.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com