# @latimes_entertainment on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DJAb8gxz-dg
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/33890497-latimes-entertainment-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/aa83b20c2b.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-04-28T22:21:26.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** L.A. Times Entertainment (@latimes_entertainment) — https://gondola.cc/latimes_entertainment

## Caption

Perhaps no storage room is more hallowed in cinema than the 67-square-foot space known as the Criterion Closet. That tiny office closet is huge on social media thanks to criterioncollection’s “Closet Picks” videos, which launched in 2010, featuring famous actors, directors and musicians entering the space, picking movies to take home and explaining why those films mean so much to them. The videos, which now number more than 260, have become appointment viewing for movie lovers, who relish watching their favorite artists rhapsodize about cinema in unrehearsed, genuine ways. Many Criterion junkies have imagined what it would be like to hang out in that closet — to be enveloped in that cozy cocoon of great movies. For them, the Mobile Closet is the next best thing.

“For the 40th anniversary, we’ve been talking about, ‘What could we do that truly engages all the people that love film?’ ” El Shami explains about the Mobile Closet’s origins. “Somebody said, almost as a joke, ‘What if we put the Closet in a truck?’ We were like, ‘You know what? Maybe that’s exactly what we should do.’ ”

The Mobile Closet debuted at last year’s New York Film Festival, with Criterion offering guests a first-come, first-served chance to buy the company’s carefully curated, beautifully packaged movies. (The celebrities who do “Closet Picks” get theirs for free.) A downpour intervened then as well, but over the festival’s two weekends, the Mobile Closet was a hit, inspiring the company to do a stop in Brooklyn at St. Ann’s Warehouse and then travel halfway across the country to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. (It will return to L.A. June 6 to 7, parked at the Aero Theatre during the American Cinematheque’s popular Bleak Week festival.)

For all of the Closet’s viral success, Criterion’s executives seem to abhor talking about it as a marketing tool. El Shami, only hired a few months ago, insists, “Criterion is not a very brand-forward or marketing-forward company.”

Read more at the link in latimes_entertainment’s bio.

🖊️ timgrierson 
📸 etilauphoto / For The Times 

#criterion #criterioncollection #closetpicks

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## Tags

criterion, closetpicks, criterioncollection

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