Many an internet cinephile has wondered aloud if the Criterion Closet is a real place, or just a set thrown together to make videos when famous directors like Christopher Nolan, Francis Ford Coppola, or Jim Jarmusch drop by. It turns out indeed to exist, not only at Criterion’s offices in New York, but also elsewhere. The Criterion Mobile Closet, for example, has taken the label’s home-video library on the road since 2024, the 40th anniversary of the company’s foundation. If it comes to your town, queue up in as timely a fashion as possible, and you may get the chance to enter and remain inside for three minutes. That may sound brief, but no less an auteur than Wes Anderson takes almost a minute less to make his cinematic selections in the new video above.
The occasion was the Criterion Mobile Closet’s stop at the Hollywood Bowl, which coincided with the three-night concert event Music from the Films of Wes Anderson this past June. With a few days’ travel ahead of him, he picks out nine Criterion releases as viewing material to take along on “our road trip across America.”
With an eye toward pleasing the entire family, he goes mostly for “reliable, standby” classics, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps and continuing on to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (“my daughter loves this movie”), and two from Ernst Lubitsch, Heaven Can Wait and Design for Living — a picture that must appeal to Anderson on several levels, not least in that it deals with Americans in Paris, a set of which he’s long been a member.
Other of Anderson’s more canonical picks include Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve with Barbara Stanwyck, “one of the greatest actresses in the history of cinema, as everybody knows”; Stagecoach, which requires by way of introduction only the name of John Ford; and, from Satyajit Ray, not the celebrated Apu trilogy (which Nolan took home) but Charulata, the inspiration for the binocular shots in his own Moonrise Kingdom. He also pulls from the shelf Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (“remember, Bill Murray is in there”), a somewhat more recent selection. What stands out even more is the practically brand new Flow, Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis’ dialogue-free adventure movie with only animal characters. It may have yet to pass the test of time, but if the man who directed Isle of Dogs likes it — to say nothing of Criterion’s imprimatur — it’s surely worth a watch.
Related content:
Wes Anderson Names 12 of His Favorite Art Films
Jim Jarmusch Picks His Favorite Films from the The Criterion Collection
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
