20 Apr 2026

Noah Wyle’s Closet Picks

The actor and director shares his intimate connections to Eating Raoul and The Great Escape, explains what defines “the Lubitsch touch,” and praises the heartrending performances in The Last Picture Show.

Noah Wyle: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

18

17 single, 1 box set

single films

17

chosen on their own

box sets

1

one choice, many films

films reached

20

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.

970 A Face in the Crowd 1957 954 Forty Guns 1957 654 Repo Man 1984 625 Eating Raoul 1982 1027 The Great Escape 1963 1122 ’Round Midnight 1986 667 Seconds 1966 170 Trouble in Paradise 1932 173 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 1943 288 F for Fake 1975 224 Pickup on South Street 1953 658 Medium Cool 1969 417 This Sporting Life 1963 535 Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence 1983 SET A Whit Stillman Trilogy: Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco 533 Crumb 1995 549 The Last Picture Show 1971 251 Shadows 1959

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	A Face in the Crowd	Elia Kazan	1957	8
2	Forty Guns	Samuel Fuller	1957	3
3	Repo Man	Alex Cox	1984	10
4	Eating Raoul	Paul Bartel	1982	4
5	The Great Escape	John Sturges	1963	6
6	’Round Midnight	Bertrand Tavernier	1986	7
7	Seconds	John Frankenheimer	1966	7
8	Trouble in Paradise	Ernst Lubitsch	1932	2
9	The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp	Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger	1943	4
10	F for Fake	Orson Welles	1975	2
11	Pickup on South Street	Samuel Fuller	1953	7
12	Medium Cool	Haskell Wexler	1969	4
13	This Sporting Life	Lindsay Anderson	1963	4
14	Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence	Nagisa Oshima	1983	3
15	A Whit Stillman Trilogy: Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco box set, 3 films			2
16	Crumb	Terry Zwigoff	1995	7
17	The Last Picture Show	Peter Bogdanovich	1971	4
18	Shadows	John Cassavetes	1959	2

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1932 to 1995, box sets 1990 to 1998

A Whit Stillman Trilogy: Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco

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 20films run 37 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 123.2 minutes of film for each of its 18 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 18 choices had been taken by 4.78 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 A Whit Stillman Trilogy: Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco, taken by 2 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of Terry Zwigoff, through Crumb, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com