Mike Mills Gets Criterion Box Set Treatment
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- Criterion Collection released "I'll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills," a box set bundling his three features with early shorts and music videos.
- The set includes the 1996 short Deformer and music videos for Air ("All I Need") and Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer," the latter featuring what Mills calls a "beautifully unhinged" Saoirse Ronan.
- The three films — Beginners, 20th Century Women, and C'mon C'mon — form an unplanned "triptych" about his father, mother, and his own experience of fatherhood, with Mills saying he never intended them to be read as connected.
- Beginners earned Christopher Plummer an Oscar at age 82; Mills mined his father's experience as a closeted gay man who came out late in life and died at 80.
- Mills credits Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, which he saw at age 27 on the Upper West Side, as the moment he thought, "I could do that" — and he made it to cinema sideways through skateboarding, the Alleged Gallery, and an EPK shoot for Frank Black.
- Before filmmaking, Mills designed album covers for the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, and Cibo Matto, and he writes to music loops — Frank Ocean's Blonde for C'mon C'mon, The National for the 2019 short "I Am Easy to Find."
Why it matters: The Criterion box set cements Mills as a canonical American filmmaker, giving his loose family trilogy a permanent archival home alongside the short films and music videos that shape his visual DNA. For viewers, it delivers rare context — the Beastie Boys album covers and Godard shelf at Kim's Video that fed into Plummer's Oscar-winning turn — in one package.
