Criterion Web Site

[Perkins Cobb]

Man, is that ugly. Maybe it looks better on a telephone?

[Clarence]

It definitely seems this redesign was done with mobile in mind. It looks horrendous and is terrible to use on desktop. Everything is just way too big and clunky. This is not the case on my phone, and it's actually pretty usable.

[Boosmahn]

Very happy about the inclusion of higher-quality stills, and the site is nice to use on mobile. Way too clunky on desktop, though; maybe everything will be made smoother over the next few days?

[domino harvey]

I'm on mobile and it looks awful

[MongooseCmr]

It looks about par for mobile sites, just unremarkably bland and smooth.

Sad to see the old site go. When I first heard of Criterion I spent hours trawling through it and taking in those stills and videos at the top of every page, imagining what the movie would be based on one picture. The way this site shows the cover first makes business sense but is a lot less exciting.

[Big Ben]

If Criterion's goal was to make me as frustrated as possible they've succeeded magnificently.

[mfunk9786]

Think the site looks great on desktop. Almost like this stuff is subjective!

[starmanof51]

It looks like Filmstruck on mobile, same elements

[The Pachyderminator]

Well, I knew this day would come eventually. That site was untouched for years, after all. I'll refrain from complaining about the design, which would be pointless since I hate almost all modern web design anyway.

However, I'm very disappointed at the apparent loss of one feature I used all the time. I bookmarked the URL for the listing of all the films, in list view, sorted by spine number, with all results displayed at once. This included all the spine numbers first, then films from box sets with no individual spine number, then the Eclipse series in order. I found it extremely useful to have everything in compact form on one page. That seems to be impossible now. You can sort by spine number, but it only loads 50 at a time and I can't see a way to display the whole list at once.

[criterionsnob]

They have a few kinks to work out. The old 'Chud' April Fool's joke appeared as the main image under "All Films." I just placed an order, and it shows every address I've ever placed an order from, with no way to delete old addresses from my account.

[Ribs]

I think it's fine. Comparing it to the Arrow redesign, it's a home run. The old site wasn't really disfunctional, but I understand why Filmstruck integration probably prioritized shaking things up. Irritating to see the much cited "better optimized for mobile - no more pinch and zoom necessary!" as though it has ever been a serious physical labor for anyone to pinch and zoom. I'm sure they'll sort out and bring back some of the functionality like actual filmmaker pages shortly enough.

It is fantastic that the videos are now available in HD, meaning pretty much any release will have a ready-made peek at the transfer in good resolution upon announcement.

[Gregory]

I'd forgotten this was happening, so it was odd today logging on to look up info about a release and on my 22-inch screen being greeted with Johnny Depp's weird sparse adolescent facial hair at life size, but I'll adapt.

[Morbii]

Disaster on mobile...(haven’t tried desktop).

I’m one of those that prefers more information visible as opposed to it fitting the screen and having to spend an hour to confirm a spine number.

[Luke M]

The mobile site reminds me of Barnes and Noble. I do like that it’s optimized for mobile as I do most of my browsing on my phone. I’m fairly nostalgic about the old site so this’ll take some time getting used to.

[domino harvey]

It somehow is worse on desktop

[Charles]

Afraid to look.

The iPad is unable to resolve a few things so far.

[Minkin]

Uh-oh, Criterion is messing with their website layout and it isn't too pretty.

Ditto. Although you think it looks bad for you, the site doesn't load the videos / background images for me with Opera, so the website is just the text + huge grey squares. I guess we'll get used to it eventually. Though I do think its nicer to actually see the films you can buy, rather than wading through Current posts!

It does look alot like the Janus re-design + Filmstruck. I suppose they want to unify their three websites. Hopefully the bugs will be resolved and all of the info that was previously available will return, and that the re-design won't lose them sales (hey, check out this Criterion site for some cool movie news... two years later... wait, they sell movies too?)

[tenia]

Wow.
That's... not very good.
I kind of dislike, generally speaking, the tiles-sliding websites, which I don't find very practical because you can't scroll totally freely. The same happens here, and it makes on top of that the website interface quite heavy. It's also not very well-thought to have the shopping sections overlap with each other. For instance, when you go in the Accessories subsection, you still have huge links to the "collections" of movies for sale ("Shot in Technicolor", "Starring Jeanne Moreau", etc). You'd think "Oh wait, they created Accessories collections ?", but no, it's just that despite being in the Accessories subsection, there still are "unrelated" links thrown on the page.

Finally, never been fond of the one-page style but with a "load more" button at the bottom. Just show it all, goddammit !

EDIT : still in the Accessories subsection, filters available for sort are by "Spine, Director, Title, Year, and Country". Which of course doesn't make sense at all and give you weird results.

[isakorg2]

Well, I suppose we'll get used to it. That was the second thing that ran through my head. The first, the immediate reaction, was the shot from afar of the Bates house at night and Norman's anguished cry from the house he discovers that something has happened: "Mother! Oh, God! Mother! Blood! Blood!"

[Rayon Vert]

Finally, never been fond of the one-page style but with a "load more" button at the bottom. Just show it all, goddammit !

Yeah, that's annoying as hell.

Another, more minor annoyance: when you go to the Coming Soon page, you don't get the dates under each BR. You have to click on each one to get that info.

[Feego]

I might be alone in this, but I miss being able to see the DVD covers in the instances where they differ from the Blu, e.g. Beauty and the Beast, Charade.

[Feego]

A couple more things I noticed. The covers have all been converted to Blu-ray size, meaning that covers for movies that are still DVD only are missing some of the image, as you can see below (Amazon's image on the left, Criterion's on the right):



Also, it doesn't appear that you can order individual Essential Art House discs. They are no longer given as options on a film's page, and Pygmalion is just listed as out of print now.

[albucat]

The old pages loaded quickly and made for a good resource. The new ones... are new. They look overdesigned to me, and trying too hard to look "good." Unfortunately, rarely does a redesign make substantial changes once it's gone live (small ones, yes, but substantial... this is probably what we've got now).

[tenia]

I bookmarked the URL for the listing of all the films, in list view, sorted by spine number, with all results displayed at once. This included all the spine numbers first, then films from box sets with no individual spine number, then the Eclipse series in order. I found it extremely useful to have everything in compact form on one page. That seems to be impossible now. You can sort by spine number, but it only loads 50 at a time and I can't see a way to display the whole list at once.

I just tried that, because that's a feature I liked too (for allowing having ALL OF THEM listed on a single page), and you now need to scroll humpteen times to click on Load More, and after repeating that 10 times, you might have the whole BD collection visible, which kind of defeats the original purpose.
Also, but it might be coming from my outdated version of Chrome, but I can't click on the releases to go on their individual page from there, as if the list was isolated from the product pages.

[movielocke]

I bookmarked the URL for the listing of all the films, in list view, sorted by spine number, with all results displayed at once. This included all the spine numbers first, then films from box sets with no individual spine number, then the Eclipse series in order. I found it extremely useful to have everything in compact form on one page. That seems to be impossible now. You can sort by spine number, but it only loads 50 at a time and I can't see a way to display the whole list at once.

I just tried that, because that's a feature I liked too (for allowing having ALL OF THEM listed on a single page), and you now need to scroll humpteen times to click on Load More, and after repeating that 10 times, you might have the whole BD collection visible, which kind of defeats the original purpose.
Also, but it might be coming from my outdated version of Chrome, but I can't click on the releases to go on their individual page from there, as if the list was isolated from the product pages.

i imagine more people will start using Wikipedia or spreadsheets to view the whole collection the way the website used to allow, but probably not too many, as this works for most of their customers, if not the extreme collectors/parsers.