Tracy Letts vs. the Criterion Closet: The House of Dynamite Star Already Owns Every Disc

File this under collector goals: Tracy Letts walked into the Criterion Closet and basically said, yeah, I already own everything in here. And then he still recommended a stack of movies. King move.

The setup

Last year, while Carrie Coon was doing press for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, she told me she and her husband, Tracy Letts, are serious about physical media. That tracks. Letts wrote Killer Joe and has turned up in all kinds of stuff — Homeland, Ford v Ferrari, and he stars in Kathryn Bigelow's upcoming House of Dynamite. He has also been very vocal about actually owning the movies you love, not just hoping they stay on a streamer.

The flex

Criterion posted a new Closet video with Letts on October 18, 2025, and he did something no one else has done on that series: he admitted he already owns every disc in the room. All of them. Still, he went shelf-diving and pulled out favorites, because of course he did.

What he picked (and why)

• Kwaidan — the Japanese horror anthology classic. A first-pick kind of statement if you want to signal taste and also creep yourself out.
• Do the Right Thing — Letts calls it the best movie of the 80s. He also says the decade itself is underrated, which is correct. For contrast, Quentin Tarantino has called the 80s the worst decade for film; Letts is firmly Team Actually Good.
• Hoop Dreams — to Letts, it's both the greatest sports movie ever made and the best movie of the 90s. Hard to argue with either.
• Berlin Alexanderplatz — Fassbinder's 15-hour epic. Letts basically dares you to watch it properly:

"If you want to be a movie person, you turn off the streaming, put this on, put on some pants, sit down on the couch and take your dissonance like a man!"

Then he swings to the other end of the runtime spectrum with Anthony Mann's western Winchester '73, a comparatively brisk sit after that Fassbinder marathon. He also spotlights the Renown collection of Randolph Scott westerns — the Criterion Channel did a month of those a while back, and I tore through them — plus Howard Hawks' Red River, Alan Rudolph's Choose Me, Love Jones, and a few more deep-cut-leaning picks.

Bonus physical media love

On a related note, I interviewed Letts for House of Dynamite — those chats go up this week — and he gave Arrow Video's recent restoration of A Fistful of Dollars a big thumbs up. The man walks the disc-collector talk.

Anyone out there actually own the entire Criterion Collection too? If so, I want to hear about the shelf situation.