If I Walked Into the Criterion Closet: Five Films I’d Reach For — Part I
Films of Discipline, Desire, and the Work of Becoming
There is something ceremonial about stepping into the Criterion Closet. The shelves hold not merely films, but restorations of memory and intention. Each spine reflects a decision made by curators who believe certain works deserve preservation, study, and return. If I were allowed inside, I would not rush. I would move deliberately, aware that whatever I chose would quietly testify to the shape of my interior life.
What follows is not a ranking but a progression. It is a movement through discipline, desire, and the slow work of becoming.
I. Babette’s Feast (1987)
Criterion Spine #665
I would begin with grace.
This film has become a yearly tradition for my wife and me. Every Thanksgiving, while most of the country consumes noise and spectacle, we return to that quiet Danish village. It feels fitting to watch a story about a feast on a day set aside for gratitude. Yet what continues to draw us back is not the meal itself, but the posture behind it.
Babette’s Feast unfolds with restraint, as though aware that meaning deepens when it is not forced. The story of an artist who spends everything she has on a single meal is framed not as extravagance, but as offering. In plain rooms inhabited by guarded hearts, art enters not as spectacle but as service. The feast does not demand recognition; it transforms those who receive it.
The film has come to represent something foundational for me: craft as devotion. Excellence is not self-advertisement; it is sacrifice. The discipline required to prepare something beautiful without assurance of applause carries a weight that lingers long after the final course is served. Each year, as we watch it again, I am reminded that the most meaningful work often unfolds quietly, in rooms where no one is keeping score.
II. The Piano (1993)
Criterion Spine #1167
From grace, I move into silence.
The Piano is a study in expression constrained by circumstance. Its protagonist inhabits a world that does not easily receive her voice, and so her inner life pours itself into music. The landscape feels elemental with wind pressing against skin, water swallowing footsteps, wood resonating beneath touch. Emotion in this film is not declared; it is endured.
What compels me most is the tension between desire and containment. The film neither romanticizes rebellion nor sentimentalizes restraint. Instead, it allows feeling to accumulate with a density that mirrors the weight of unspoken words. It is beautiful and brutal in equal measure.
The score lingers long after the final frame. There is something in the way the music carries longing without melodrama that continues to move me. It reminds me that some forms of strength are quiet and some forms of longing do not announce themselves loudly. They resonate beneath the surface, shaping us from within.
III. The Age of Innocence (1993)
Criterion Spine #913
Then I reach for repression shaped by elegance and the quiet violence of manners.
The Age of Innocence examines the architecture of social order with remarkable precision. Its characters inhabit a world in which every gesture is calibrated and desire must pass through the filter of decorum before it is allowed to breathe. The tragedy resides not in spectacle but in glances held a moment too long, in letters written and unsent, in choices made for the sake of stability rather than passion.
What resonates with me is the film’s refusal to caricature duty as villain. Restraint appears both as virtue and as prison. The cost of honor is measured not in public disgrace but in private forfeiture.
Scorsese’s attention to detail is meticulous. Costumes, dinner settings, and the choreography of rooms filled with expectation communicate suffocation without ever raising their voices. It is a film about control rendered with exacting care, and that precision deepens its ache.
IV. Topsy-Turvy (1999)
Criterion Spine #1036
After restraint, I turn toward process.
Topsy-Turvy strips away romantic notions of artistic inspiration and replaces them with the tangible labor of creation. Gilbert and Sullivan are peak bromance goals. Rehearsals falter. Egos collide. Patience thins. Yet from this friction emerges something coherent and lasting. The film attends carefully to the mechanics of collaboration and the daily grind required to refine an idea into performance.
What I admire most is its honesty about effort. Great work rarely appears fully formed. It is argued into shape, corrected in real time, revised through fatigue and persistence. Watching this film feels less like witnessing genius and more like observing discipline sustained over time. And the songs are absolute masterpieces.
I simply adore this movie. Much of the dialogue lives in my memory. Its rhythms feel familiar to me not only as a viewer but as someone who has spent decades inside creative processes. The arguments, the doubt, the exhilaration when something finally aligns. This film understands that artistry is not magic. It is work. Horror! Horror!
V. A Room with a View (1985)
Criterion Spine #198
For the final movement of this first installment, I step back into restraint, but this time, something begins to break through.
A Room with a View carries many of the same thematic threads as The Age of Innocence: social expectation, emotional repression, and the quiet tension between duty and desire. But where Scorsese’s world feels suffocating, this one allows light to enter. It breathes. It opens.
The story follows Lucy Honeychurch as she navigates the rigid expectations of Edwardian society while sensing—almost against her own instincts—that something more honest is possible. The conflict is not loud. It unfolds in glances, hesitations, and small acts of defiance. What makes the film resonate is its understanding that awakening is rarely immediate. It arrives gradually, often in moments we almost miss.
What I’ve always loved about this film is its aesthetic sensibility. There is a distinct elegance to it, what I think of as the James Ivory touch. The composition, the pacing, the way interiors and landscapes mirror emotional states, it all feels deliberate without ever becoming rigid. There’s a softness to it that never loses its precision.
And then there’s Helena Bonham Carter in one of her earliest roles. There’s something striking about her presence here—an openness, a sincerity, a kind of unguarded intelligence that anchors the film. Watching her in this performance, you can see the foundation of everything that would follow in her career. It’s a silent, deeply effective portrayal.
This film shifts the arc in an important way. It suggests that discipline and restraint are not the end of the story. That desire, once acknowledged, begins to move in an inevitable way.
Closing Reflection
Taken together, these films form a study in formation. They examine how individuals are shaped by devotion, silence, social code, collaboration, and competitive systems. They move from offering to endurance, from refinement to pressure. Each suggests that becoming is not accidental. It is carved through restraint, through effort, through confrontation with structures larger than oneself.
In the next installment, Part II, the movement shifts inward. Isolation deepens. Illusion fractures certainty. Identity grows less stable. Eventually, one film stands at the center, a work that did not merely impress me, but unsettled me in ways that continue to echo.
I love this! Lots of favorites and long-loved masterpieces here for sure. I should do one of these soon.