One of the most famous twists in film and television history comes at the end of a Twilight Zone episode titled “Time Enough at Last.” A henpecked nebbish manages to survive the apocalypse in a library, surrounded by all the books he never had the bandwidth to read before—only to immediately shatter his Coke bottle-thick eyeglasses.

This cruelly ironic fate captures with cinematic flair the high drama of subscribing to the Criterion Channel—the world’s best streaming library, and one of its worst streaming apps.

Just when you think it’s the perfect moment to finally watch The Night of the Hunter for the first time—whoops, the app doesn’t work on your TV.

For those who may not be cinemaniacs, the Criterion Collection is a film distribution company that preserves historically relevant films with high-quality restorations and honors other notable works by inducting them into its rarified canon. Following the 2018 collapse of highbrow subscription streamer FilmStruck, then home to many Criterion offerings, the company launched its own service, the Criterion Channel, the following year.

While it doesn’t always have every single Criterion-blessed film on tap, what the Criterion Channel has is a profoundly deep bench of stone-cold classics, deep cuts, world cinema standouts, and offbeat new releases. It’s entirely possible to save untold thousands on film school tuition as a Criterion subscriber by just mainlining the most heralded works in cinema history and listening to director commentary tracks and other supplemental materials that demystify the craft that went into making them.

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