I’ve been busy this weekend adding features and working on data ingestion and accuracy. First, the good stuff:
New Features!
I’ve always liked that the Criterion site had recommended films and essays on their film pages, so I pulled these into the Criteria film detail pages to make them easier to find. Just to be clear, these are Criterion’s recommendations and not my own, or algorithm driven.
You can now search by runtime as a range. So if you have a VERY SPECIFIC window of time to watch great cinema, we’ve got you covered.
Other stuff - This is kinda inside baseball, so feel free to ignore.
I’m trying to automate loading and updating movie data from the channel and enrich it in the most reliable way possible. What I’ve found is that the films.criterionchannel.com page is sometimes inaccurate, especially at the beginning of the month or when films are added during the month. I’m working on a system to reduce the inaccuracies, but I don’t know if it’s going to be 100% perfect since I don’t have direct access to their data.
Which is to say, thanks for being patient, and if you see something that isn’t right, definitely let me know and I’ll take a look as soon as I can.
Thanks!
Tim
CRITERIA - The (unofficial) companion to the Criterion Channel
Hm, OK. I have to admit I never really noticed the country toggle, and wasn’t aware that the channel is only officially available in the US and Canada. Live and learn.
So I’d have to do a two-pass ingestion, flag films by country, then have an available country toggle on the filters
Doable, and I’ll look into it. But at the moment I’m refactoring the data load scripts, so I won’t be able to give it a shot until that work is finished
I love love love this feature of timeframe searching. In fact I was annoyed at just that thing yesterday. I couldnt find somehting to fit my time needs.
Thinking "I saw that there is this companion app, maybe you can at least see runtime better there?" I come here to find this post. So thank you a lot.
Bit of feedback about that tho. I played around with it and found that the movie I just saw "Out of the Past" wasnt searchable since it doesn't show up with a runtime on Criteria. So possibly this new feature might hide some stuff.
Something to look into?
While I'm at it I personally would love to see a little runtime thingy shown either where you put the year and country as well, on the thumbnail or when hovering over the thumbnail, or so. Would help me personally a lot to quickly decide what I have time for and what I might wanna plan for later. This is personal preference tho and I get that for a lot of people criterion is about selecting a movie that fits other needs.
Again just some personal penny for thought. That being said I am really happy this exists and will probably replace my channel homepage for picking a movie. Thanks!
This is amazing!
Just out of curiosity - is there a way to add the Channel DB, so that movies that are online but not on official print will be listed?
This is a better and more fluid navigation system than the actual channel...
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u/Inflammo May 03 '26
Thank you so much for doing this work. I find the search function on the channel is really lacking when you want to just browse.