Criterion has a video series called Closet Picks where filmmakers, actors, and directors visit the Criterion warehouse and pick their favorite films off the shelves. Each episode is a few minutes of someone you admire wandering through rows of spines, pulling titles, and explaining why they matter to them.

It’s one of my favorite places on the internet to discover great films.

The Problem

There are over 400 episodes spanning 15 years. It’s easy enough to find a particular person’s recommendations, but I was curious about what films were picked most frequently, and what many people had to say about them. There was no way to get that info in aggregate, and so I thought I’d build one.

What I Built

Criterion Closet Picks is a searchable database of every guest and every film from the series.

Search across everything. Find any guest or film instantly.

Guest quotes. Every pick includes the what the guest said about why they chose it, pulled directly from the video and linked to the moment they said it.Quotes are extracted from YouTube transcripts using Gemini, then linked back to the source video at the right moment.

Browse by guest. Pick a filmmaker and see every title they pulled off the shelf, with their commentary for each one.

Browse by film. Pick a Criterion title and see everyone who’s ever recommended it and what they said about it.

Most popular. See which films rise to the top when hundreds of guests make their picks. Some expected titles and some surprises!

Random pick. My personal fav feature. Don’t know what to watch? Get a recommendation from a guest at random.

Criterion Closet Picks is live, and the code is on GitHub.