Mike Mills' Family Trilogy Gets Criterion Box Set
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- The Criterion Collection released 'I'll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills,' gathering the triptych of Beginners (2010), 20th Century Women (2016), and C'mon C'mon (2021) along with early shorts and music videos.
- Mike Mills began as a graphic designer for the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, and Cibo Matto before making his 2005 debut feature Thumbsucker, then pivoting to deeply personal films drawn from his own family.
- Beginners — inspired by Mills' father's late-in-life coming out as gay, followed by his death at 80 — won Christopher Plummer an Oscar at age 82.
- The Criterion set also includes Mills' 1996 short Deformer and music videos for Air's 'All I Need' and Talking Heads' 'Psycho Killer' (featuring a young Saoirse Ronan), materials producer Kim Hendrickson argued were essential to the box.
- Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line was Mills' filmmaking epiphany at age 27, prompting him to walk out of the theater thinking 'I could do that,' while Spike Jonze and Jim Jarmusch served as secondary gateways through skateboarding and the Lower East Side film scene.
- Mills writes and shapes scenes by listening to music on loop — Frank Ocean's Blonde while drafting C'mon C'mon, The National for a 2019 collaboration — saying his films function musically even when no score is playing.
- Mills told Criterion he trusts lists over dramaturgical arcs, calling the latter 'manipulation' — a sensibility he traces to his design background and to Morris's essayistic documentaries.
Why it matters: The Criterion box formally canonizes a trilogy Mills insists he never planned, bundling his most personal films (his father's coming out, his mother's 1970s Santa Barbara, his own first brush with fatherhood) with the visual-art and music DNA that fed them. For collectors and educators, the inclusion of Deformer and the music videos — long unavailable in clean form — offers the clearest view yet of how a Cooper Union art schooler became one of American indie's most distinctive humanists.
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