The source

Three pages carry the whole dataset. The Closet Picks search page lists every visit. Each visit's own page lists what that guest chose, in the order the page shows them. And the collection list gives every film Criterion sells, with its spine number, director, country and year, which is the denominator for anything phrased as a share.

Box sets are one choice

Guests do not only pick single films. 102 different box sets have been chosen, and a set is one decision however many discs it holds. Counting the Bergman set as 39 picks would put Bergman far above everyone else on packaging alone, so rankings on this site count a set once.

Where the question is about films rather than choices, sets are opened up: that is the difference between 842 films picked directly (49% of the collection) and 1264 reached in total (74%).

What this misses

• 1 box set could not be opened up, because the page now redirects to Criterion's sets listing. Those still count as picks; their contents are unknown.
• A guest's trade ("actor", "writer and director") is read from Criterion's own blurb, which follows no fixed form. It is filled in for 74% of guests and left blank otherwise rather than guessed.
• Joint visits are split into their guests, so a pair counts as two people sharing one visit. A trade is only attributed on a solo visit, since "the pair behind Portlandia" describes neither person's job.
• Order within a visit is the order Criterion's page lists, which is not necessarily the order things were picked on camera.

What comes from TMDB

Criterion publishes director, country, year and spine, and nothing else. Genre, public rating and runtime come from TMDB, matched on title and confirmed on the director's surname. 1686 of 1718 films matched (98%).

The 32 that did not are mostly television, which a movie search cannot see, and compilations with no single entry. Every page built on these fields prints its own coverage, because an average over 98% of the collection is worth reading and one over 40% is not.

Two deliberate exclusions: a rating from fewer than ten voters is dropped rather than averaged, and a runtime TMDB records as zero is treated as unknown rather than as a film of no length.

Refresh

Rebuilt weekly. This build ran 2026-08-18 and read 403 of 403 visits and 1718 films.