in Film | July 27th, 2026 Leave a Comment

Maybe you’ve already seen Christo­pher Nolan’s new cin­e­mat­ic inter­pre­ta­tion of the Odyssey more than once; maybe you don’t know whether you’ll ever get around to it at all. Either way, you’ve got to admit that the man makes films in a way very few liv­ing direc­tors do. His com­bi­na­tion of block­buster-scale spec­ta­cle and per­son­al vision, a rare expe­ri­ence indeed at the the­ater these days, can real­ly only be achieved by film­mak­ers with a thor­ough­go­ing love of the medi­um. Most of us will require no fur­ther proof of that love than this new video cap­tur­ing his vis­it to the Cri­te­ri­on Clos­et, that both hal­lowed and much-YouTubed space jam-packed with releas­es from the most wide­ly known home-video brand for cinephiles.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, it’s not his first vis­it. “Last time I was here, there were no cam­eras, and I got to just come and steal some films,” he says, “but now I’m singing for my sup­per.” Unlike some film­mak­ers, he does­n’t play it cool for the audi­ence; rather, he imme­di­ate­ly starts pulling down Don Siegel’s neo-noir Hem­ing­way adap­ta­tion The Killers, a five-pic­ture John Cas­savetes box set, and Al Rein­ert’s Bri­an Eno-scored NASA doc­u­men­tary For All Mankind. It’s not a sur­prise to see him go for an Orson Welles movie, but the one that first catch­es his eye is Mr. Arkadin, which Welles “made all over the world in the scrap­pi­est, most sort of home­made, put-his-friends-togeth­er, grab-some-cos­tumes, find-an-inter­est­ing-loca­tion kind of way.”