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25 Underrated Movie Gems to Stream Right Now on the Criterion Channel

It’s worth taking a dive into the channel's obscure but vibrant depths.

25 Underrated Movie Gems to Stream Right Now on the Criterion Channel
Photo: Janus Films

It’s encouraging that, about a year after its launch, the Criterion Channel remains with us. Less encouraging—from an end-of-days perspective—is that most of us now have an abundance of time to explore it. If self-isolating to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic has upsides, though, having time enough to poke around the varied corners and depths of the streaming service counts as one of them.

The selection of films on the Criterion Channel rotate quickly, making the films it highlights as “leaving at the end of the month” more vital than most other sites’ similar sections. In a sense, this makes the Criterion Collection’s streaming platform feel more alive than services that have more stable caches and their own in-house content. The new films that pop up at the beginning of the month—in March, the channel has included Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life and a number of German silents—are akin to special events. The shifting library of films functions like a vast, curated program available in our homes.

The sense that the channel is driven by curation rather than algorithm is no doubt intentional. If, with its esoteric film library and novel programming, the streaming service seems rather offbeat, this is in large part because we’re now used to receiving viewing suggestions from systems that emulate only in outline the mechanism of recommendation. We’ve grown reliant on the facile generic groupings (“drama,” “adventure,” “comedy”) typical of algorithm-driven services. Criterion pointedly ignores genre in favor of auteur, country of origin, or cultural context; a mainstay on the site for several months, amid the controversy over another male-dominated Oscars season, has been its prominent featuring of women filmmakers.

As the Criterion Collection continues to hold on to its niche in an arena dominated by Amazon, Netflix, Disney, among other hopefuls, it’s worth taking a dive into the channel’s obscure but vibrant depths. Many of the films below are rare finds—not only in the world of streaming, but in the era of home video. Pat Brown

Editor’s Note: Click here to sign up for the Criterion Channel.

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The Adventures of Prince Achmed

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926)

Now justly recognized as the first fully animated feature film, Lotte Reiniger’s masterpiece—composed of cut-out animation of silhouettes on monochromatic painted backdrops—transports us to dreamlike realm. Closely related to the contemporaneous experimentations in animation carried out by figures like Oscar Fischinger and Walther Hans Richter, The Adventures of Prince Achmed lends the orientalist fairy tales it recounts a rhythmic grace. As Prince Achmed journeys through various motifs from the “Thousand and One Nights,” the visual pleasure lies in the reverie of watching the cinema imbue mere shapes with life. Brown


The Ascent

The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)

A World War II film in which heroism is a myth, Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent focuses on two Soviet partisans (Boris Plotnikov and Vladimir Gostyukhin) who are left for dead in the snow-covered Russian countryside. Shepitko’s camera alternates between passages of realism and lyricism, entrenching her characters within a course of almost certain death. If Sheptiko’s soldiers experience only pain at the hands of their merciless German captors, it’s to better articulate the tragedy of their fundamental innocence within the war machine. Clayton Dillard


Asparagus

Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979)

A Jungian psychosexual mescaline trip in the form of an 18-minute animated short, Asparagus is at once a vibrant blast of psychedelia and an unsettling journey into the depths of the subconscious. Suzan Pitt’s film was famously paired with Eraserhead on the midnight-movie circuit back in the late ’70s, and it’s as equally resistant to interpretation as David Lynch’s classic. Proceeding with a dream logic that recalls the symbolist experimentalism of Maya Deren, Asparagus’s imagery ranges from the lushly verdant to the uncannily profane—often within the same scene, as in the film’s haunting climax in which a faceless woman robotically fellates an asparagus spear. Watson


Begone Dull care

Begone Dull Care (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, 1951)

If a jazz combo hired Stan Brakhage to direct their music video, the result might look something like Begone Dull Care. Set to the buoyant bebop of the Oscar Peterson Trio, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren’s zippy animated short is one of the purest marriages of music and image in the history of cinema. Using lines, shapes, and abstract textures painted and drawn directly onto celluloid, the film grooves along to the jazz music—at times using particular colors to represent individual instruments, at others delivering a frenetic freeform visual accompaniment to the music, but always delivering a dazzling showcase of the animators’ inventiveness and dynamism. Watson

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Body and Soul

Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925)

Body and Soul, Oscar Micheaux’s melodrama about sexual violence within a southern black community, was controversial even among black audiences. Noted as the film debut of Paul Robeson, the film bucks expectations by casting the handsome singer as Isaiah T. Jenkins, a criminal masquerading as a preacher. Jenkins beguiles a local worshipper, Martha Jane (Mercedes Gilbert) into leaving him alone with her daughter, Isabelle (Julia Theresa Russell). He rapes Isabelle and steals Martha Jane’s savings. As Jenkins palms the hard-earned cash, Micheaux inserts a woeful montage: Martha Jane’s hands ironing clothing, anonymous black hands picking cotton off the plant. Brown


Burden of Life

Burden of Life (Heinosuke Gosho, 1935)

Heinosuke Gosho’s deceptively simple slice-of-life tale explores the lingering resentment of a father (Tatsuo Saitô) toward his youngest son (Masao Hayama), who’s the product of an unplanned pregnancy. In just a shade over an hour, Burden of Life shrewdly navigates the reverberations of this generational rift by balancing its brash humor with an unsentimental bittersweetness, probing the economic and societal pressures forced upon the family and casting a compassionate eye on the evolving struggles of both father and son. Derek Smith


Death of a Cyclist

Death of a Cyclist (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955)

Juan Antonio Bardem’s emotional white-knuckler is filled with expressive, noir-tinged imagery that conveys all the anxieties and suffering of two lovers (Lucia Bosè and Alberto Closas) who flee the scene of an accident so as not to have their affair discovered. This action stands as the epitome of bourgeois indifference, which Bardem positions as a symptom of the reactionary measures taken throughout Franco’s Spain. Through a creative use of associative editing, Bardem repeatedly butts the lovers’ fears up against their potential actualization, their promises to one another with their eventual betrayals, and their potential paths toward redemption with their callous acts of self-preservation. Through its seemingly small-scale inciting incident, Death of a Cyclist spirals outward to reveal the far-reaching effects of a regime whose fascistic decree breeds selfishness and spiritual bankruptcy within seemingly everyone living under its watch. Smith


Deep Crimson

Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)

Based on the same real-life couple who inspired 1970’s The Honeymoon Killers, Arturo Ripstein’s Deep Crimson is an elemental drama that works like a knife to the heart of ecstatic romance. Ripstein’s direction further deglamorizes any notion of the outlaw couple that Bonnie and Clyde made chic with its central couple’s slow-motion coup de grace. To that point, this couple’s (Daniel Giménez Cacho and Regina Orozco) deliberation over whether to murder a child witness ranks among cinema’s starkest and most disturbing considerations of the horror inherent to killing. Dillard

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The Demon

The Demon (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978)

Though he directed dozens of films across more than 30 years, Yoshitaro Nomura is little known in the U.S., perhaps because his work is almost comprehensively unavailable on home video. The Demon bears a resemblance to Nagisa Oshima’s similarly themed Boy in its depiction of a forsaken lower class. Once Sokichi (Ken Ogata) finds himself saddled with caring for three children after his wife and mistress both abandon him, things only spiral further out of his control, and Nomura pushes the proceedings to unexpected extremes through his central character’s desperation. Ogata’s chilling performance rivals his greatest work from the following year in 1979’s Vengeance Is Mine. Dillard


The Ear

The Ear (Karel Kachyňa, 1970)

Karel Kachyňa’s The Ear is a searing indictment of the communist surveillance state, capturing the creeping sense of dread and paranoia that imperceptibly invades the domestic space of a senior ministry official (Radoslav Brzobohatý) who discovers his house is littered with listening devices. With rough, handheld camerawork and an array of claustrophobic compositions, Kachyňa conveys the sheer terror and helplessness of being a mere cog in an authoritarian machine, bent to the will of vast, unseen forces whose whims and motives can change at any moment and strip even high-level operatives of their dignity and security. Smith


Forest for the Trees

Forest for the Trees (Maren Ade, 2003)

Shot on handheld, early-aughts DV, Maren Ade’s first feature looks like its main character Melanie (Eva Löbau) feels: drab, unsteady, not quite ready for the world. A wide-eyed young teacher, Melanie butts up against boisterous students, jaded colleagues, and, most of all, the embarrassing failure to meet her own expectations. The Germans have a word to describe the feeling of watching Melanie fail to navigate her escalating predicament: fremdschämen, or to feel embarrassment for someone else. While fremdschämen can be funny, this isn’t The Office. Ade quietly transforms our amusement at Melanie’s self-exacerbated predicament into empathy, and then drops a heart-rending conclusion on us, whose visual power belies the film’s lo-fi look. Brown


History Is Made at Night

History Is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937)

Producer Walter Wanger came up with History Is Made at Night’s title, which Frank Borzage loved, and the director began work without a script, filming everything on the fly. It all starts as a noir-ish society melodrama, switches gracefully to romantic comedy, and then proceeds to deepen the feelings between Jean Arthur’s Irene Vail and Charles Boyer’s Paul until they reach the highest Borzagian spiritual love. A week before the film wrapped production, Wanger arrived on the set and said that the whole thing was going to end with a shipwreck, which resulted in a surprise climax of breathless suspense. This is a film where the craziness of its work conditions and the blending of styles was taken up by Borzage to stand in for the craziness and exposure of falling in love. Dan Callahan

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Japanese Girls at the Harbor

Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933)

Not a single shot, including title cards, goes to waste in this visually remarkable 1933 silent about two friends forced onto divergent paths after a violent act of passion forces one to flee, ultimately taking up a life of geishadom. The ever-present reality of change is first suggested via an opening scene of ships departing the girls’ harbor town, while Hiroshi Shimizu’s trademark tracking shots suggest the fragile nature of choice (and morality) in a chaotic, sometimes immoral world. Rob Humanick


A Japanese Tragedy

A Japanese Tragedy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1953)

A Japanese Tragedy is a bracing piece of social commentary about an aging widow (Yūko Mochizuki) struggling to provide for her two callous, unappreciative children (Yôko Katsuragi and Masami Taura). Director Keisuke Kinoshita deploys jagged, jarring editing to bounce between pre- and post-war Japan as well as archival clips of student protests and peace rallies. It’s a warped, kaleidoscopic vision that vividly presents a country still reeling from the trauma of war, where moral depravity and a creeping sense of nihilism continues to spread unabated like the detritus of an atomic bomb. Smith


Mr. Freedom

Mr. Freedom (William Klein, 1970)

A hybrid of Godard in full-on genre mode with the political fire of Godard in Dziga Vertov mode, but heavily filtered through Harvey Kurtzman-era Mad magazine, Mr. Freedom shows America no mercy. The entire country is reflected in the title character, a bulldog agent for the government who begins the film dressed as a racist Southern sheriff and who in one scene single-handedly raids a black family’s dinner, spewing reactionary propaganda at them and, with scarcely a lick of explanation, mowing them down with a machine gun. Why? Because that’s the American way. Eric Henderson


No More Excuses

No More Excuses (Robert Downey Sr., 1968)

No More Excuses seems to be a placeholder in Robert Downey Sr.’s career, as its most imaginative strand—a Civil War soldier played by the director awakes from his battlefield wound in 1960s New York—is footage recycled from his first short seven years earlier. In the most Borat-like stunt in his oeuvre, Downey interrupts an actual game at Yankee Stadium by strolling onto the field in his Union Army duds, thrilled to be among other anti-Rebs. This return to fully moving pictures seems the most superficial and random of Downey’s broadsides against good taste and sanctimony. Bill Weber

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The Outlaw and His Wife

The Outlaw and His Wife (Victor Sjöström, 1918)

Victor Sjöström’s The Outlaw and His Wife is a tale of redemption played out against the vast expenses of nature, which can turn from accommodating to forbidding from one moment to another. Humanity’s geographical-spiritual link to the elements has always been Sjöström’s great theme, and here it is explored in images at once allegorical and tactile. The heat of a geyser feels as palpable as the chill of a frostbitten cave, and the idyllic suddenly turns animalistic: When surrounded by galloping intruders, the wife (Edith Erastoff) impulsively hurls her child down a gorge like a wolf sacrificing its cub. Fernando F. Croce


Poto and Cabengo

Poto and Cabengo (Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1980)

Jean-Pierre Gorin liked to call his film Poto and Cabengo, about a pair of identical twin girls who spoke exclusively in a strange language of their own invention, an “investigation” rather than a “documentary”—and with good reason. Gorin doesn’t simply tell these girls’ story, he creates an open-ended interrogation of its meaning and implications. With idiosyncratically choppy editing and his own wry, mock-noirish narration, Gorin explores the complexities of the sisters’ socially isolated upbringing and draws parallels to his own biography as a recent French transplant to the United States. The result is an endlessly inquisitive study of language, alienation, and the American dream. Watson


Powwow Highway

Powwow Highway (Jonathan Wacks, 1989)

A road-trip buddy comedy that’s also finely attuned to the capitalist exploitation of Native Americans, Powwow Highway evinces the strengths of indie filmmaking that settles into often overlooked geographical regions of America. Director Jonathan Wacks shoots the Montana landscape with affection while crafting stubborn, but completely human characters, as Buddy (A Martinez) and Philbert (Gary Farmer) set out for Santa Fe after the former’s sister is arrested. The film is comparable in tone and spirit to Allison Anders’s Gas, Food, Lodging, with humor and pathos conveying the down-home spirit that often accompanies life in so-called flyover country. Dillard


Profound Desires of the Gods

Profound Desires of the Gods (Shôhei Imamura, 1968)

In Shôhei Imamura’s sprawling, island-set epic Profound Desires of the Gods, archaic beliefs and rampant incest collide with the more callous, yet measured, hand of capital, in the form of large sugar company looking to secure labor for nearby mill. As with most Imamura films, man’s savagery and potential for twisted sexuality are foregrounded, but the film never devolves into a simplistic tale of the debased becoming cultured or vice versa. Instead, the civilized outsider and primitive islanders coalesce into a strange amalgamation that disrupts and ultimately destroys the prior harmony that held the island together, bringing into question what truly lies at the core of man’s heart of darkness. Smith

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Sing a Song of Sex

Sing a Song of Sex (Nagisa Oshima, 1967)

One wonders what Yukio Mishima would have made of Sing a Song of Sex, with its freeform fusion of semiotics lecture, protest pamphlet, and karaoke night. In it, Nagisa Oshima contemplates the squandered revolutionary potential of the young as a quartet of university students (including pop singer Ichiro Araki) obsess over women, project disturbing fantasies, and learn from their professor (future director Juzo Itami) that bawdy songs are true expressions of the masses. It builds to a frontal attack of an oppressive order in which the characters’ blood-stained hands remain lucidly presented even as the celluloid around them seems to be dissolving before our eyes. Croce


Snow Trail

Snow Trail (Sankichi Taniguchi, 1947)

If anyone in Hollywood is searching for striking international properties to snatch up for a big-budget remake, look no further. An unheralded influence on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, Sankichi Taniguchi’s Snow Trail, which is set during a blizzard in the Japanese mountains, is an 89-minute crackerjack chase film with quick-witted characters and sumptuous on-location photography. Like Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress years later, the film’s admixture of an adventure plot, a memorable setting, and breathless pacing practically leaps off the screen. That the film also marks the debut screen performance of Toshiro Mifune is an added historical bonus. Dillard


Taipei Story

Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985)

Edward Yang’s Taipei Story performs an autopsy on a handful of relationships, all of them unfolding against a neo-lit Taipei, which seems by turns inviting and ruinous. After Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien, who co-wrote the film with Yang) returns from a trip to Los Angeles, he explains its “just like Taipei,” and spends much of the remainder of the film contemplating a move to the States with Chin (Tsai Chin), a woman who’s lost the ability to articulate her feelings of discontent. As a character bleeds out in a Taipei gutter near the film’s conclusion, an American corporation is setting up shop just a few blocks away, thus completing the other half of the tautology: Taipei is just like L.A. Dillard


Variety

Variety (E.A. Dupont, 1925)

This silent German classic casts the era’s most accomplished film actor, the bulky Emil Jannings, in the unlikely role of a trapeze artist who grows jealous of his female partner’s attentions. This simple plot forms the basis for the wild visual experiments of cinematographer Karl Freund. Freund rapturously wallows in Weimar cinema’s obsession with its own visual intensity, swinging the camera through the air and using superimposition to capture a sensational, subjective reality. If the script depicts a conventional love triangle, it’s clear from the imagery that the visual maelstrom of spectacle is what truly drives Jannings’s acrobat murderously insane. Brown

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The White Stadium

The White Stadium (Arnold Fanck, 1928)

While the Olympic Games are the focus of all the films in the Criterion Collection’s epic 100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912-2012, several take the time to document the host cities. Snowy environs are depicted in luminous fashion, most notably in 1928’s The White Stadium, shot in St. Moritz by geologist turned filmmaker Arnold Fanck. The film is as much a testament to the beauty and majesty of St. Moritz as it is to the games themselves. It was Fanck, in fact, who discovered Leni Riefenstahl and cast her in his “mountain films.” One imagines Riefenstahl had The White Stadium in mind when she filmed both parts of Olympia, though her sense of pageantry far outweighs Fanck’s more picturesque approach. Dillard

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