24 Aug 2026
Ben Mankiewicz’s Closet Picks
The Turner Classic Movies host celebrates the new Stanley Kubrick season of TCM’s podcast The Plot Thickens with The Killing and Paths of Glory, praises how Orson Welles’s collaborators on Citizen Kane enabled him to make an unforgettable film, and shares his love for crime films like The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Ben Mankiewicz: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest
Watch on Vimeo This one is not on Criterion's YouTube channel, and their Vimeo copy will not play outside criterion.com · 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.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  The Killing | Stanley Kubrick | 1956 | |
| 2 |  Paths of Glory | Stanley Kubrick | 1957 | |
| 3 |  In a Lonely Place | Nicholas Ray | 1950 | |
| 4 |  Elevator to the Gallows | Louis Malle | 1958 | |
| 5 |  Citizen Kane | Orson Welles | 1941 | |
| 6 |  Sullivan’s Travels | Preston Sturges | 1941 | |
| 7 |  Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore | Martin Scorsese | 1974 | |
| 8 |  Night Moves | Arthur Penn | 1975 | |
| 9 |  The Friends of Eddie Coyle | Peter Yates | 1973 | |
| 10 |  Harlan County USA | Barbara Kopple | 1976 | |
| 11 |  This Is Spinal Tap | Rob Reiner | 1984 |
How far across film history it reaches
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 11films run 17.8 hours. The median visit runs 18.9 hours, over the 379 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 97.1 minutes of film for each of its 11 choices, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 379 visits with a complete total, the median is 135.2 minutes.
How unusual this haul was
Its 11 choices had been taken by 5.09 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, taken by this visit alone.