Is there a word for the selective removal of items from a list (other than cull)?

Pare down would be a good choice.

Lexico:

pare

verb

[with object]

1.2 Reduce (something) in size, extent, or quantity in a number of small successive stages.

‘union leaders publicly pared down their demands’

‘When he wrote the play, his intention was that there should be no excess and so each scene is pared down to exactly what he wants to say.’

used with list:

Advisers first help a student select 20 to 25 colleges, prodding the student along until he or she pares down the list to the eight or so to be considered seriously. (Guidance For Sale, TAMALA M. EDWARDS, Time Magazine: 1999/11/01)

Oregon plans to expand its Medicaid program to cover all families under the poverty line, but also to ration their care by paring down the list of medical procedures Medicaid would pay for. (new game-plans take shape in Washington, Christian Science Monitor , 1991/11/26)

In the context of programming, filter is universally used to describe the process of taking a list and removing items from it based on some criteria.* The Cambridge dictionary has:

to select or remove a particular type of information from something:

• This command filters the search results by location.
• The software is well suited to small phone screens because it filters out unnecessary information.
• Most email apps use spam filtering tools.

*Some programming languages will create a new list instead of modifying the original one, but the concept is the same

winnow - to reduce a large number of people or things to a much smaller number by judging their quality

Trim (MWD):

 1. c. to free of excess or extraneous matter by or as if by cutting

• trim a budget

• trim down the inventory