u/InitiativeNo7660

Hey everyone!

I’ve been busy, and have some good stuff for you this week. But first, to catch people up:

Criteria is a (very unofficial) companion site to the Criterion Channel featuring the search and browse features that I wish the service had, so I’m just going ahead and building them myself. You can create an account if you want to mark things as favorites, rate films, and create custom lists - but the search and browse features are available without an account. While I use AI tools to create the site, none of the content is AI generated.

Ok, now for this week’s updates:

1. Data cleanup! A good chunk of time was spent overhauling the ingestion process and creating reports on data issues. The accuracy should be much better now, and I’m continuing to clean up wrong and missing data, but you might still find some (occasionally hilarious) errors. For example, today I noticed that the French film The Beast was identified as Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which is sadly not available on the channel. Progress - not perfection

2. Canada!: As an early present for Victoria Day, Canadian users can set their country preference in their user profile. So results will now reflect availability for our friends in the great North

3. Collections!: I honestly doubted if I would be able to pull collection data reliably, but thanks to rpeters on Letterboxd, who is truly doing the lords work, we have collection browse available, with each linking back to the list on Letterboxd as well as the landing page on the channel. So far I’ve loaded the last couple of years worth, and hope to have the full set available over the next week or so. You can also favorite collections with an account

Up next, I’m planning to create topic tags for the collections to make them easier to filter and navigate

As always, thanks for your suggestions and feedback. Let me know if you see any issues, and enjoy!

https://www.search-criteria.com

Tim

I’ve been busy this weekend adding features and working on data ingestion and accuracy. First, the good stuff:

New Features!

1. 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.
2. 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

http://www.search-criteria.com