Danny McBride’s Criterion Shelf Is Way More Film-School Than Kenny Powers
Danny McBride may have built a career playing men with absolutely volcanic confidence, but his Criterion Closet visit reveals the much nerdier truth underneath: this man has serious film-school taste.
The actor, writer and creator digs through The Criterion Collection’s Closet Picks and starts connecting the dots between the movies he loves and the comedy, characters and filmmaking that eventually became part of his own work.
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From Kenny Powers to Kalatozov.
Dig into the films that shaped Danny McBride, from New Hollywood classics to surreal animation and one of cinema’s most dazzling feats of camera movement.
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Two of the biggest tells are Five Easy Pieces and A Face in the Crowd. McBride talks about both as films that fed into the kind of deeply flawed, swaggering men he and his collaborators would later build their own stories around.
That connection makes perfect sense. Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces is restless, abrasive and impossible to pin down, while Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd turns charisma into something much darker. You can absolutely see pieces of that energy echoing through McBride’s own gallery of beautifully terrible men.
McBride also grabs George Washington, the 2000 debut feature from David Gordon Green, which gives him a natural excuse to look back on a collaboration that stretches across decades. McBride appeared in Green’s All the Real Girls before the pair went on to work together repeatedly across film and television.
Then comes one of our personal favorites here at INYIM Media: I Am Cuba. Not a documentary, but Mikhail Kalatozov’s astonishing 1964 Soviet-Cuban drama, the film is famous for its elaborate tracking shots and gravity-defying camera work. McBride praises the cinematography, and frankly, yes. Correct answer.
His shelf keeps getting better from there: Badlands, Fantastic Planet and After Hours all make the cut, giving the pile a little Terrence Malick, René Laloux and Martin Scorsese for good measure.
And because wandering through more than a thousand Criterion titles can eventually fry anybody’s brain, McBride finishes by letting chance take over. His blind grabs land on Rashomon, Manila in the Claws of Light and Night of the Living Dead.
Inside Danny McBride’s Criterion Closet Picks
More stills from McBride’s Criterion visit, where his picks range from New Hollywood and political satire to experimental animation and international cinema.
Basically, if you only know Danny McBride as Kenny Powers, Neal Gamby or Jesse Gemstone, this is your reminder that the guy underneath all that chaos is also the film obsessive helping decide what those characters and worlds actually feel like.
Watch Danny McBride’s Criterion Closet Picks
McBride discusses Five Easy Pieces, A Face in the Crowd, George Washington and I Am Cuba, then rounds out the visit with several more favorites and three blind picks.
Sources: The Criterion Collection; Criterion / YouTube.
