Building the perfect film collection – with help from Ben Affleck

Telegraph

07-05-2025

From the look of the queue stretching down Eagle Rock Boulevard in Los Angeles on a recent Saturday, you might have guessed a Hollywood A-lister was hosting a meet-and-greet. Hundreds of film fans – some of whom had been in line since 5am – were huddled under umbrellas, the rain doing little to dampen their spirits. But the attraction wasn't Timothee Chalamet, Zendeya or Tom Holland. It was a small white van, 16-square-feet inside, packed wall-to-wall with, of all things, DVDs.
The Criterion Closet might be small in size but holds a huge place in online movie fandom. Since 2010, it's been the backdrop to over 250 episodes of Closet Picks, a series of beloved YouTube videos in which actors, writers, directors and the occasional musician raid a utility cupboard containing the archive of art-house and world cinema home video distributors Criterion. Guests have a few minutes to pick out DVDs and Blu-Rays of often obscure movies they'd like to take home, waxing lyrical about their admiration for said films as they go.
On paper, that might sound like Supermarket Sweep, with less Dale Winton and more Agnès Varda. In actuality, it's more like Desert Island Discs, with guests' film choices becoming jumping off points for short, wholesome insights into who they are and how film has helped shape them. In one episode, songwriter Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie finds himself on the brink of tears discussing 1984 homelessness documentary Streetwise, because of his sister's involvement in youth homelessness.
In another episode, Before Sunrise star Ethan Hawke regales his daughter Maya (of songwriting and Stranger Things fame) with tales of taking her mother, Uma Thurman, to see the John Cassavetes film Husbands on one of their first dates. Whoever the guest is, there's a film in the company's archive – the prestigious Criterion Collection, as it's known – that speaks to their life, their loves, their inspirations as a film-maker and often their anxieties about the world.
In a decade and a half, the series has attracted 3.3 billion views and the biggest names in Hollywood; in the last few weeks alone, Ben Affleck, Seth Rogen and Carrie Coon have been among its guests. Closet Picks is often memed and parodied in viral videos that poke affectionately at the reverence of its guests towards cinema. (My personal favourite? The guy who staged his own Closet Picks in the DVD section of a sex shop).
And if you venture to one of the world's premier cinephile spaces, you're bound to see at least one person wearing Criterion merch (you know the urban myth about how on the London underground, you're never more than six feet from a rat? That may actually be true of London's Prince Charles Cinema and people clutching Criterion tote bags).
Though the closet that hit Los Angeles last weekend wasn't the actual Criterion Closet – that's in the company's New York offices – the mobile version that fans queued for in Eagle Rock, created to celebrate their 40th anniversary, remains a huge draw. The lines in LA mirrored similar queues in Texas at SXSW festival last year, where fans also waited for hours for just a three-minute slot inside.
'How did it come to this,' you might be wondering? And understandably so. Calling Closet Picks' success 'unexpected' is like calling the films of Criterion fave David Lynch 'a little bit kooky.' Physical media is supposed to be dead, its obituary written a thousand times over since the advent of streaming (DVD and Blu-Ray sales slumped 23.4 per cent in 2024, generating under $1 billion in sales; a drastic fall compared to 20 years ago, when sales exceeded $16 billion).
And YouTube, lest we forget, is a platform where loud, hyper-bright content is what tends to attract millions of views per video – not static shots of a grey utility cupboard. (Ironically, for a series in which cineastes discuss some of the most beautifully shot cinema of all time, Closet Picks is, for all its other strengths, unavoidably drab in aesthetic.)
Unlike other hugely popular YouTube series frequently by Hollywood royalty, there's no grabby hook to the series, or entertaining challenge to watch a celebrity take on. No one is participating in a fake romantic date in a chicken shop in Closet Picks; legendary documentarian Ken Burns isn't forced to put his ability to handle extra spicy sriracha sauce to the test when he makes his appearance in Closet Picks.
And yet, the series, as one top Hollywood publicist tells me, rivals those YouTube successes as an 'this genuine against-the-odds sensation. In an otherwise quite cynical time for online content, it's so earnest – literally just people dorking out about DVDs, talking about movies they love. It's that simple.'
Part of its popularity is undoubtedly the guests that Closet Picks attracts. Everyone from Gen Z favourites like Ayo Edebiri to old guard icons of the industry like Francis Ford Coppola have recorded episodes, with the series now 'one of cornerstones of any campaign for a star on the awards trail or promoting a new movie,' the aforementioned Hollywood rep continues. 'It's incredibly legitimising to go into the Criterion Closet and talk about your love for Kurosawa or whoever. Even if you're promoting a big popcorny blockbuster with nothing Kurosawa about it, showing off your knowledge and appreciation of cinema can reframe you in the eyes of a particular type of movie fan.'
This 'absolutely' would have been the case with Affleck's recent appearance on Closet Picks, they add. The Accountant 2 – the actor's new thriller – has little in common with the films the former Batman star picks out (Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle, David Lynch's The Elephant Man, Terrence Malik's Badlands and so on).
Appearing on Closet Picks to promote that film, however, 'reminds people he's a serious film lover and generates a bit more warmth among dyed-in-the-wool movie buffs towards The Accountant 2 than might have otherwise been the case,' they explain, adding: 'it's probably no accident that he self-effacingly calls his [famously despairing] DVD commentary to Armageddon the best work of his career here. Ben – or a publicist who advised him, whichever – knows Closet Picks' audience.'
The attraction for stars is obvious. The Criterion Closet is a vacuum where all that exists is film – 'I feel like I'm in one of those sensory deprivation pods where you're only surrounded by the greatest cinema ever made,' as Andrew Garfield put it during his appearance in 2024. There are no tricky questions to navigate about rumoured relationships, or whether or not they'd work again with their former co-star, recently arrested on domestic abuse charges.
And as for Criterion, Closet Picks is a shop window for their library of over 1,000 titles that no doubt bumps their sales tenfold. The Criterion Collection today is regarded as a hall of fame-style exclusive club to which entry is one of the ultimate cineaste seals of approval. That's at the very least in part due to Closet Picks.
But star power isn't what's made Closet Picks a phenomenon. The likelihood is its appeal runs deeper. Over the last few years, a new culture of film fandom has emerged online that Closet Picks' format seems to dovetail with, rooted in a simple idea: that the films you love are a paper trail for your personality, an expression of who you are.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Criterion Collection (@criterioncollection)
Since the pandemic, Letterboxd – a social media app for cinephiles in which users log the films they've watched – has grown from two million active users to 17 million, all of whom are invited to share their four all-time favourite movies (a format since developed into a popular celebrity interview series akin to Closet Picks). The text accompanying these selections often reads more like diary entries – confessionals that link these movies to times in users' lives; sometimes sad, sometimes happy, always formative. Closet Picks sees film-makers light up in a wholesome way as they do the same.
Is there a bit of pantomime to what films guests select? Probably. A frequent accusation against the series on Reddit and other social media platforms is that there's an element of performance to what some guests choose, opting for the obscure instead of what they actually like to mark themselves out as true cinephiles.
But we're living in a time in which streaming services have harpooned access to cinema from more than a decade or two ago. The likes of Netflix have decimated the physical media market that historically made it possible for viewers to watch older films, while simultaneously declining to host classics on their service (as of March, 1973's The Sting was the oldest title on the American version of the platform).
Between its physical media and their own streaming service, The Criterion Channel, offering hundreds of historical movies, Criterion as a company are vital to the current film ecosystem – one of the last bastions against that erasure of over 80 years of film history. Any grumbles or eye-rolling about selections, in that light, somewhat slide away.
After the extensive crowds in LA, with many people reportedly turned away, Criterion haven't announced where their mobile closet will pop-up next. Wherever it is, expect queues to snake around the block once more. There's a lot of cinema history in those 16-square-feet.
The stars who entered the closet – and the films they picked
Andrew Garfield
Terry Gilliam's Brazil
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes
David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin's Salesman
Steve James's Hoop Dreams
Mike Leigh's Naked
Ken Loach's Kes
David Fincher's The Game
Todd Solondz's Happiness
D. A. Pennebaker's Original Cast Album: Company
Juzo Itami's Tampopo
Barry Jenkins
Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander
Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy
Andrew Haigh's Weekend
John Cassavetes: Five Films
Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog
Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine
Joel Coen's Blood Simple
Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl
Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding
Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher
David Gordon Green's George Washington
Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon
The Essential Jacques Demy
The Complete Jacques Tati
Minnie Driver
Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve
Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue
Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table
Josh and Benny Safdie's Uncut Gems
Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law
Edouard Molinaro's La Cage aux Folles
Josh and Benny Safdie
Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet
Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Ohuru
Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project No. 2
Lino Brocka's Manila in the Claws of Light
Harmony Korine's Gummo
Gus Van Sant's To Die For
John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday
Edward Yang's Yi Yi
John Lithgow
Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels
Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life
Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
The Complete Jacques Tati
Brian De Palma's Blow Out
Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes
John Waters