Nearly every digital media streaming service uses AI to formulate the categories you see on a subscription service. You watch a movie or show, it adds that selection to a hidden profile of “you” and suggests you more content based on what you like. Watch a few more, suddenly you have a feedback loop going. You only ever watch what is familiar to the last thing you watched. Criterion does something completely different. There are no suggested categories for you in particular. Rather, it’s ran by a dedicated team of movie watchers who select interesting categories and bundle them together based on similar themes. Maybe one week there’s a whole list of movies that are based around 1980’s throwbacks, or another that are all about great practical visual effects. The point is, you’re bound to find many, many movies you’ve most likely never heard of before that will change your life. It’s also by far the cheapest streaming service at $100 a year with no ads and free downloads. Plus, they send you non-expiring coupons in your email for their shop to purchase DVD’s and Blu-Rays. I have dropped nearly all of my other streaming subscriptions and solely use Criterion for my movies. It is above and beyond in quality and I cannot recommend it enough.

I love Criterion, and I signed up for this service on the first day that they started accepting customers, but the app has been a source of frustration. I think a lot of decisions were made to favor aesthetics over usability, and there’s a lot of extra clicking required for no reason. For example, you click on a film title and it takes you to the film’s main page, but the film’s description is not fully visible—if you want to read about it, you have to click again to see the full description. Why? It makes no sense. Just show the whole description, and make the page scrollable if you need more space. Also, if you want to add a film to your library or download it, you have to click two more times—once to show the options, and then a second click to select. When browsing, you can see the films’ running times, but once you click on a film, length is no longer shown (although the films title and director are displayed multiple times on the same page) so you have to exit the film’s page if you want to see its running time. And you have to be careful not to touch the sides of the screen, as I often do on my iPad to scroll, because the app will take you out of the film’s page to the previous screen. Honestly, if I thought they would fix the various usability issues, I’d be willing to spend a few hours documenting what needs to be done, because It’s kind of a shame to have the worlds best film catalog with this awkward interface. But in the end, I’m also just grateful that they are providing access to this catalog, and I hope they can keep it up indefinitely.

A lot of issues I have with several other streaming apps were resolved with The Criterion Channel. I was bothered by the lack of special and extra features in streaming services, such as Netflix, which made physical media much more appealing to me overall. Also, most streaming services are bereft of classic hollywood cinema, indie films, and foreign films and have a constant stream of mainstream or populous media. This creates a stale library content for most streaming services and quality varies immensely month to month. The Criterion Channel is the main streaming service that I know of (other than Mubi) that dedicates itself to a strong curation of content from cinema around the world and around different time periods while also including many special features existing in only the physical media versions of these films. Also, they have specialized playlists and categories that are centered around film genres, directors, technical works, and themes that are rare to see in other streaming services (or at least this level of dedication). Please subscribe to The Criterion Chanel and give it a watch. I do not want this streaming service to suffer the same fate as Filmstruck and would like this stand its ground against the other streaming giants.

While I mourned the end of Filmstruck, I’m even happier with the Criterion Channel. I initially thought it was going to be just Criterion films, but that’s not the case due to the differences between streaming rights and distribution rights. So, films that Criterion may not be able to acquire for physical releases (even if they want them) may very well be easier to license for streaming. This keeps it interesting! The whole channel feels extremely curated in the best way possible, down to each well written synopsis. And of course, the supplemental videos for some films are *chef’s kiss* fantastic. In the past month or so I’ve really only been using this app to watch movies. A lot of the other services feel so bogged down lately by so many options and I can never tell the quality. It was getting frustrating until I remembered I had this app. Oh and if you feel overwhelmed by all the new stuff you’ve never heard of before, check out their Instagram - they’re constantly posting about interesting films and series. Sometimes all it takes is seeing a screenshot of a film for me to watch it! As far as functionality goes, I have no complaints. Maybe in the future they could have a rating or like feature so the app could recommend films.