12 Jan 2026

Laura Dern’s Closet Picks

The actor fondly recalls working with David Lynch on I nland Empire , praises the comedic brilliance of Albert Brooks, and mentions Robert Altman and Spike Lee as directors whose films capture “the essence of culture, community, and truth.

Laura Dern: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

21

18 single, 3 box sets

single films

18

chosen on their own

box sets

3

one choice, many films

films reached

41

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.

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	3 Women	Robert Altman	1977	9
2	McCabe & Mrs. Miller	Robert Altman	1971	6
3	Tanner ’88	Robert Altman	1988	2
4	Fanny and Alexander box set, 3 films			7
5	Persona	Ingmar Bergman	1966	5
6	Diabolique	Henri-Georges Clouzot	1955	2
7	The Umbrellas of Cherbourg	Jacques Demy	1964	2
8	Belle de jour	Luis Buñuel	1967	5
9	The Philadelphia Story	George Cukor	1940	7
10	David Lynch: The Art Life	Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergaard-Holm	2016	1
11	Inland Empire	David Lynch	2006	4
12	Smooth Talk	Joyce Chopra	1985	2
13	Real Life	Albert Brooks	1979	3
14	Defending Your Life	Albert Brooks	1991	12
15	Essential Fellini box set, 14 films			16
16	Scorsese Shorts	Martin Scorsese		6
17	The Awful Truth	Leo McCarey	1937	4
18	Do the Right Thing	Spike Lee	1989	20
19	The Night of the Hunter	Charles Laughton	1955	11
20	The Last Picture Show	Peter Bogdanovich	1971	4
21	America Lost and Found: The BBS Story box set, 7 films			7

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1937 to 2016, box sets 1950 to 1987

Essential Fellini

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story

Fanny and Alexander

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: Scorsese Shorts (no year on record). 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

40 of its 41 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 77.1 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 21 choices had been taken by 6.43 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was David Lynch: The Art Life, taken by this visit alone.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com