30 Jul 2026
Mahershala Ali’s Closet Picks
The actor talks about how accurately Hoop Dreams captures the journey of being a young athlete, shares why Hollywood Shuffle has become even funnier with time, and praises Jeffrey Wright’s performance in Basquiat.
Mahershala Ali: 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 |  Yojimbo | Akira Kurosawa | 1961 | |
| 2 |  Hoop Dreams | Steve James | 1994 | |
| 3 |  Short Cuts | Robert Altman | 1993 | |
| 4 |  Hollywood Shuffle | Robert Townsend | 1987 | |
| 5 |  Basquiat | Julian Schnabel | 1996 | |
| 6 |  Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai | Jim Jarmusch | 1999 |
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 6films run 13 hours. The median visit runs 18.9 hours, over the 379 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 129.5 minutes of film for each of its 6 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 6 choices had been taken by 4.5 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Yojimbo, taken by 2 visits in total.
This visit reached the work of Jim Jarmusch, through Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.