I was in the cult for years. I had hundreds of Criterion discs.
It started with the laser discs because they were far superior to video tape and had “extras”. Then the DVD releases tended to have extras regular releases didn’t and Criterion was also known for throwing a few dimes at rehabilitating the picture quality of degraded film.
Then, when high definition came out, everything changed. We cultists found ourselves trying to upgrade to the new format. This was extremely expensive and would never be complete. Oh, and Criterion started releasing 72 movies a month.
I’ve grown to be far more selective. I still buy Criterion releases but usually they have the name Divine or Waters on the box somewhere.
Maybe they are getting a smidge better, at least on the streaming side. Criterion Channel has an Afrofuturism collection that’s new this month and it’s pretty fantastic. 28 films, I think I’m close to half way through and have found a bunch of cool new shit that I had no idea about before.
Now if they would just fix their sucktastic UI and search function.
It also doesn’t help that you can find a movie on the streaming service/app/website in the “wrong” way. I’ve only had Criterion Channel a month now and I have found special features for movies that don’t show up when you select the movie. The “collections” are sometimes really borked and if you don’t know that the movie was part of a collection, you can find the movie listed separate from the collection. So they may have the commentary track (making of, or whatever) of the film you are interested in, but it doesn’t show up unless you search for it.
Every movie that has special features has a collection dedicated purely to that movie and its extras. For example, City Lights:
However, if you are looking at a larger collection, one not merely dedicated to one single movie, you may not find all special features in that particular collection. For example, Directed by Charlie Chaplin:
This collection contains the film City Lights, but if you click on the film CL within this collection, you will only find the film itself, none of the special features. It is not arranged hierarchically.
(Note: I am posting links from the website, but the app seems to be arranged the same way.)
Hopefully, this advice will help some, although I admit it doesn’t solve all of the problems with the search function. For example, searching for many of the individual films in the Afrofuturism collection will turn up the individual films, but not the collection as a whole. Doing a site:criterionchannel.com google search for the individual title should find all collections it is a part of.
Many DVD and Blu-ray players can be unlocked without hardware modification to make them region free. (Obviously do your research first to understand the procedure, gotchas, etc.)
Criterion is actually derived from the Voyager Company that used to make great CD-ROMs in the late 1980s/early 1990s when that was a thing. Some great multimedia discs, like The Residents’ Freak Show.
A real dirtbag. No doubt about it. Only caught bits and pieces of that documentary of him using neurolinguistic programming on actors pursuing their artistic dreams and just completely crushing them.
Im sorry for the insensitive and sarcastic HH moniker and re-working a quote to fit the cult of arthouse film theme.
