Number crunching the Criterion Closet Picks

If you're a film fan of any stripe, then you're already familiar with the Criterion Collection (opens in a new window). Criterion has been restoring and reissuing art-house and classic cinema since 1984. The Criterion Closet is a cupboard in their office (a disused bathroom (opens in a new window) according to the New York Times), now shelved floor to ceiling with the company's own Blu-rays and DVDs.

When a creative professional visits the office, a filmmaker or an actor or something other, Criterion invites them into the room with a tote bag and tells them to take whatever they want. A camera rolls while the guests talk about films as they fill their boots. The videos go on YouTube. The first was Guillermo del Toro in September 2010 (opens in a new window), looking like it was shot with a smartphone.

Today it's a treasured ritual. Over 400 visits across 16 years, involving more than 400 different guests. Criterion publishes roughly six a month, at an steadily accelerating pace since 2022.

To watch these visits is a delightful experience, as the visitors share their passion for the medium in a few fleeting moments. A celebrity strolls into the cupboard, grabs a film in excitement, then explains why it changed their life. It's almost as good as receiving a recommendation from a good friend.¹Note 1¹Parasocial pitfalls, ahoy!

When you've seen more than a couple of them in succession, though, you tend to notice the same titles popping up every now and then. Police Story, for example. Or Quadrophenia. Or My Life As A Dog. Which begs the question: is there a canon of Criterion Closet Picks?

15 films jostling for the spotlight

There are multiple fan projects that scrape every visit Criterion publishes and counts them against the 1,718 films in the collection. Two of them used as the source for this post are Closet Picks (opens in a new window) and, uh, Closet Picks (opens in a new window).²Note 2²This is an SEO nightmare.

Counting only single films and not box sets, in the table below is the creme de la creme. The Spine number is the order in which the film was released. And this is just a snapshot as of 4 September 2026, since new picks are added all the time.

The most-picked film in 16 years is Do the Right Thing, at 20 visits out of 408. That's roughly one in 20. Across all those visits guests have taken 3,356 films off the shelves, or around eight films each on average.

And as you can see, things get really scrappy for the tenth spot, with six films sharing 12 picks apiece. It doesn't get much clearer down the list either, which is the sign of a good and diverse pool of selections.

In terms of repeating directors, you have Fellini and Ashby appearing twice in the list, which is quite the achievement. Fellini grabs two spots in the top five all by his lonesome!

The box set that beats every film

Ah, but remember how we omitted box sets from the table? There's a reason for that. Guests don't just take single films. Criterion offers box sets, and they're a popular strategy for folks who want to maximise their haul. This distorts the picture considerably, like so:

The Cassavetes box has left the closet 30 times, half again as often as the most popular individual film. And if you reach for the Bergman collection of 40 films, you're going to need more than a puny tote bag to carry it.

Top ten most popular directors

The box set conundrum is a tricky one, because if we were to look for the most popular directors overall, those oversize items would give the filmmakers a similarly oversized presence in the chart.

So, for the table below, we're reverting back to our single film picks as the basis for popularity, but you can also see their overall visits stat too.

This is our favourite table of the bunch, because we'd been wondering where Akira Kurosawa had been hiding all this time. But David Lynch and Martin Scorsese notably have joint ranking as the highest directors without a boxset giving them a boost.

Powell and Pressburger take two of the ten slots for one body of work, it looks like. The gap between them is exactly two films, Peeping Tom and The Thief of Bagdad, which are the only Powell titles picked without Pressburger attached.

The idiosyncrasies between the numbers

Phew, so that was a blizzard of stats. Which makes it easy to forget the appeal of watching these videos is very much in the individual guest. This one only takes horror. That one is working through Ozu. Another picks documentaries about music.

The numbers tend to varnish over the idiosyncrasies. The largest individual haul, for example, is 21 items (41 films), when Laura Dern (opens in a new window) visited the closet in January 2026, while Natasha Lyonne (opens in a new window) took 20 items (29 films) in May 2025.

And then there's Jafar Panahi (opens in a new window). In 2010 an Iranian court sentenced him to six years in prison and banned him for twenty years from making films, writing screenplays, giving interviews or leaving the country. He made six films anyway. One was shot on an iPhone inside his own flat and smuggled to Cannes on a USB stick. One was shot with two cameras clamped to the dashboard of a taxi he was driving around Tehran. He was arrested again in July 2022, spent seven months in Evin prison, and was released in 2023 after a hunger strike.

In October 2025, on a rare trip out of Iran, he walked into a room in New York holding something like 1,700 free Blu-rays and took just one film home (opens in a new window). Bicycle Thieves, De Sica, 1948, a man and his son walking around Rome looking for a stolen bicycle. Nobody else in 408 visits has taken fewer than three.

Taking your own film off the shelf

Thirteen guests have picked something they directed. Sofia Coppola (opens in a new window) took The Virgin Suicides, and her dad (opens in a new window) took Rumble Fish. Mike Leigh (opens in a new window) took Secrets & Lies. David Byrne (opens in a new window) took True Stories.

Actors do it more, and more openly. Anna Karina (opens in a new window) visited in May 2016, took five films, and three of them were films she stars in, all directed by Jean-Luc Godard, who she was married to. Ethan Hawke (opens in a new window) took The Before Trilogy. Matthew McConaughey (opens in a new window) picked Dazed and Confused.

Ben Affleck (opens in a new window), meanwhile, made sure to pick up Armageddon, which features the brutally honest commentary he gave on the making of the film (opens in a new window).

The continued relevance of physical media

Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but the popularity of the Criterion Closet Picks can't be ignored within the context of the decline of physical media and the transition to digital.

We stream movies and music over the internet, and we buy licenses to download books to read and games to play. That's led to the inevitable scarcity of their analogue equivalents, because manufacturing things is expensive and demand has dried up.

What Criterion and other boutique companies are doing, in addition to preservation and restoration of a precious medium, is celebrating items you can own, keep, and share. Long may they continue.

Oh, and to answer the questions that started all this: Police Story was chosen by seven people. Quadrophenia picked six times so far. And My Life As A Dog seven times.

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