There was a time, not so very long ago, when many Amer­i­cans watch­ing movies at home nei­ther knew nor cared who direct­ed those movies. Nor did they feel par­tic­u­lar­ly com­fort­able with dia­logue that some­times came sub­ti­tled, or with the “black bars” that appeared below the frame. The con­sid­er­able evo­lu­tion of these audi­ences’ gen­er­al rela­tion­ship to film since then owes some­thing to the adop­tion of widescreen tele­vi­sions, but also to the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion: the home-video brand that has been tar­get­ing its pres­tige releas­es of acclaimed films square­ly at cinephiles — and even more so, at cinephiles with a col­lect­ing impulse — for four decades now.

“The company’s first release was a LaserDisc edi­tion of Cit­i­zen Kane that includ­ed sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als like a video essay and exten­sive lin­er notes on the prove­nance of the neg­a­tive from which the restora­tion was made,” writes the New York Times’ Mag­a­zine’s Joshua Hunt in a recent piece on how Cri­te­ri­on became a (or per­haps the) cin­e­mat­ic tastemak­er.

“Next came King Kong, which fea­tured the first ever audio-com­men­tary track, inspired, as an after­thought, by the sto­ries that the film schol­ar Ronald Haver told while super­vis­ing the tedious process of trans­fer­ring the film from cel­lu­loid.”

With the com­ing of the more suc­cess­ful DVD for­mat in the late nine­teen-nineties, such audio-com­men­tary tracks became a sta­ple fea­ture of video releas­es, Cri­te­ri­on or oth­er­wise. They were a god­send to the cinephiles of my gen­er­a­tion com­ing of age in that era, a kind of infor­mal but inten­sive film school taught by not just expert schol­ars but, often, the auteurs them­selves. “Some of the ear­li­est were record­ed by Mar­tin Scors­ese for the Taxi Dri­ver and Rag­ing Bull LaserDiscs, which helped cement his influ­ence on an entire gen­er­a­tion of young direc­tors” — includ­ing a cer­tain Wes Ander­son, who would go on to record com­men­tary tracks for the Cri­te­ri­on releas­es of his own pic­tures.

At this point, Cri­te­ri­on has “become the arbiter of what makes a great movie, more so than any Hol­ly­wood stu­dio or awards cer­e­mo­ny.” It’s also amassed an unusu­al­ly ded­i­cat­ed cus­tomer base, as explained in the Roy­al Ocean Film Soci­ety video “The Cult of the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion.” “We’re at a point in film cul­ture where brands are increas­ing­ly more pop­u­lar than prod­ucts,” says host Andrew Sal­adi­no, a self-con­fessed Cri­te­ri­on devo­tee. “More and more, it seems as though the films and the peo­ple who made them are sec­ondary to the name and logo of the com­pa­ny behind them,” a phe­nom­e­non that Cri­te­ri­on — itself a kind of media uni­verse — some­how both par­tic­i­pates in and ris­es above.

“While stu­dios and stream­ing ser­vices chase audi­ences by pro­duc­ing end­less sequels and spin­offs,” writes Hunt, “Cri­te­ri­on has built a brand that audi­ences trust to lead them.” I can tes­ti­fy to its hav­ing led me to the work of auteurs from Chris Mark­er to Jacques Tati, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa to Yasu­jiro Ozu, Robert Alt­man to Nico­las Roeg. Today, bud­ding cin­e­ma enthu­si­asts can even ben­e­fit from the advice of famous direc­tors and actors for nav­i­gat­ing its now‑1,650-title-strong cat­a­log through its “Cri­te­ri­on clos­et” video series. Recent­ly, that clos­et has host­ed the likes of Paul Gia­mat­ti, Willem Dafoe, and Wim Wen­ders, who pulls off the shelf a copy of his own Until the End of the World — which Cri­te­ri­on released, of course, in its near­ly five-hour-long direc­tor’s cut. “I always think this is maybe the best thing I’ve done in my life,” he says, “but then again, who am I to judge?”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art of Restor­ing Clas­sic Films: Cri­te­ri­on Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitch­cock Movies

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names His Top 10 Films in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

Steve Buscemi’s Top 10 Film Picks (from The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion)

Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cas­settes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

There are two kinds of peo­ple in this world: those who rec­og­nize the phrase “corny dia­logue that would make the pope weep,” and those who don’t. If you fall into the for­mer cat­e­go­ry, your mind is almost cer­tain­ly filled with images of bleak Mid­west­ern win­ters, mod­est trail­er homes, hood­ed fig­ures smash­ing an already-junk­yard-wor­thy car, and above all, one man try­ing — and try­ing, and try­ing — to put anoth­er man’s head through a kitchen cab­i­net. If you fall into the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, it’s high time you watched Amer­i­can Movie, Chris Smith and Sara Price’s doc­u­men­tary about a hap­less aspir­ing Wis­con­sin hor­ror film­mak­er Mark Bor­chardt that has, in the 25 years since its release, become a minor cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non unto itself.

Amer­i­can Movie right­ful­ly occu­pies the top spot in the new Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy video above, which ranks the fif­teen great­est doc­u­men­taries of all time. The list fea­tures well-known works by the most acclaimed doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers alive today, like Fred­er­ick Wise­man’s Titi­cut Fol­lies, which cap­tures a tal­ent show at an insti­tu­tion for the “crim­i­nal­ly insane”; Errol Mor­ris’ The Thin Blue Line, which proved instru­men­tal in solv­ing the very mur­der case it exam­ines; and Wern­er Her­zog’s Griz­zly Man, which deals in Her­zog’s sig­na­ture height­ened yet mat­ter-of-fact man­ner with the iron­ic fate of an eccen­tric bear enthu­si­ast.

Doc­u­men­tary film has expe­ri­enced some­thing of a pop­u­lar renais­sance over the past few decades, begin­ning in 1994 with Steve James’ Acad­e­my Award-win­ning Hoop Dreams (which comes in at num­ber sev­en). More recent exam­ples of doc­u­men­taries that have gone rel­a­tive­ly main­stream include Joshua Oppen­heimer’s The Act of Killing (num­ber three), in which par­tic­i­pants in Indone­si­a’s mass polit­i­cal vio­lence of the nine­teen-six­ties recall their own bru­tal­i­ty in detail, and O.J.: Made in Amer­i­ca (num­ber five), which revis­its the “tri­al of the cen­tu­ry” now so close and yet so far in our cul­tur­al mem­o­ry. There are also intrigu­ing films of a much low­er pro­file, like William Greaves’ chaot­ic Sym­biopsy­chotax­i­plasm: Take One and the late Jonas Mekas’ epi­cal­ly but mod­est­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal As I Was Mov­ing Ahead Occa­sion­al­ly I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beau­ty.

If you watch only one of these fif­teen doc­u­men­taries, make it Amer­i­can Movie, which repays repeat­ed view­ings over a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry (as I can per­son­al­ly con­firm) with not just its com­e­dy — inten­tion­al or unin­ten­tion­al — but also its insight — again, inten­tion­al or unin­ten­tion­al — into the nature of cre­ation, friend­ship, and human exis­tence itself. “If ever, in your cre­ations, there’s doubt, or you ever feel like you’ve lost your way, if there was ever a film to watch, to realign your­self, it is Amer­i­can Movie,” says The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy cre­ator Lewis Bond. Even those of us not ded­i­cat­ed to any par­tic­u­lar art form could stand to be remind­ed on occa­sion that, as Bor­chardt mem­o­rably puts it, “life is kin­da cool some­times.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

50 Must-See Doc­u­men­taries, Select­ed by 10 Influ­en­tial Doc­u­men­tary Film­mak­ers

Watch 80 Free Doc­u­men­taries from Kino Lor­ber: Includes Films on M. C. Esch­er, Stan­ley Kubrick, Han­nah Arendt, Hilma af Klint & More

Errol Mor­ris Makes His Ground­break­ing Series First Per­son Free to Watch Online: Binge Watch His Inter­views with Genius­es, Eccentrics, Obses­sives & Oth­er Unusu­al Types

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

The 10 Great­est Doc­u­men­taries of All Time Accord­ing to 340 Film­mak­ers and Crit­ics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.