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.

Where the cover art comes from

The cover art is Criterion's, from the same collection list every other fact on this site is read off. We do not link to their images: each one is fetched once, re-encoded to 300 pixels wide as WebP, and served from this site's own origin, so browsing here never spends Criterion's bandwidth and never breaks when they move a bucket. 1,718 of 1,718 films carry one (100%), and 101 of the 102 box sets anyone has taken. Anything without one renders an empty box at the same size rather than a broken image, so no list ever shifts as the pictures arrive. The one exception is the poster frame on a visit with no video, which shows Criterion's own image from their server: two visits are in that position and neither is worth a second image pipeline.

Every name is a link

Every film in the collection has a page, including the 454 nobody has ever reached for: they are still on the shelf, and a dead end is the worst place to leave a reader who has just been told something was never picked. Every one of the 707 credited directors has a page too, not only the 161 the ranking publishes, and so does every box set anyone has taken. A name we have no page for stays plain text rather than becoming a guess at a search URL.

What comes from TMDB

Criterion publishes director, country, year and spine, and nothing else. Genre and runtime come from TMDB, and so does the rating for any film IMDb does not itself cover. A candidate is accepted only when its title agrees with Criterion's, and then only when the director's surname agrees too, or failing that a release year within a year either way. A shared surname on its own is not a match: it would attach another film's rating and nothing downstream could tell. 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. Matching is not the same as coverage: TMDB records no runtime for some of the films it does know, so every page built on these fields counts the field it actually reads rather than the match. 1681 films carry a genre and 1684 carry a runtime.

A rating from fewer than ten TMDB 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.

What comes from IMDb

TMDB's own vote counts are thin for this collection: a median of 201 votes per film, against a median of 9,150 on IMDb, forty-five times deeper. IMDb is therefore the primary rating wherever it has one, with TMDB standing in only for the films IMDb does not cover. The two are never averaged together for the same film: different scales, different populations, and blending them would describe neither. Exactly one source wins per film, and which one is recorded so a chart can name it. 1677 of 1718 films carry a rating from either source: 1676 from IMDb and 1 falling back to TMDB.

The join adds no matching of its own: the id IMDb is looked up by comes straight off the TMDB record that already matched, so it never widens or narrows which films are covered beyond what TMDB found. A rating from fewer than a hundred IMDb voters is dropped rather than published, a higher floor than TMDB's ten because IMDb's own audience per film here runs so much larger.

The line below, and the same line in the footer of every page, is IMDb's own wording rather than ours. IMDb publishes these datasets for personal and non-commercial use and sets out the conditions itself: take the data from the files they publish, agree to their conditions of use, keep the use non-commercial, and acknowledge the source in exactly the sentence they specify. So the permission is real, but it is a standing grant to anyone who meets those conditions rather than an arrangement this site negotiated, and IMDb can withdraw it whenever they like. The sentence stays word for word because changing it would break one of the conditions.

The same page permits keeping a local copy, which is what happens here: the ratings file is downloaded, cached and read from disk rather than queried per film. Nothing on this site is sold and it carries no advertising; the tip jar in the footer is a donation towards the hosting, not a sale. If that ever changed the licence would stop applying and the IMDb ratings would have to come out.

Information courtesy of IMDb (https://www.imdb.com). Used with permission.

Where the video comes from

Criterion posts every visit to Vimeo, and their Vimeo uploads are restricted to criterion.com, so an embed of one here renders a privacy notice rather than the film. The same visits are on their YouTube channel, gathered in one playlist, and those embed normally. Matching the two lists is done once by hand and the result is committed, so a weekly rebuild reads a file rather than calling YouTube. 401 of 403 visits have a video on record.

Most of them match on the guest's name alone. The ones that do not are pinned by hand rather than guessed: six guests have been in the closet twice, so their name matches two videos, and putting the wrong decade's visit on a page is the kind of mistake that looks completely fine. The 2 with no match at all are not on the channel under any title we could find, and they show a poster frame linking to Criterion's own copy instead of a player that would not play.

Refresh

Rebuilt weekly. This build ran 2026-08-19 and read 403 of 403 visits and 1718 films.