When it comes to boutique home video film distribution, you can’t get much loftier than the Criterion Collection, a physical media company (with a great streaming service) whose aim is to preserve basically any movies it deems important to the history of film as a medium. Since its founding in 1984, the company has produced more than a thousand special editions of movies from the earliest beginnings of film at the turn of the 20th century to the contemporary cinema of today, spanning many languages, genres, countries, directors, and levels of quality.
Most of its releases fall on the arthouse end of the spectrum, films from well-respected directors of world cinema or unappreciated hidden gems that have been newly restored and deserving of physical preservation. For many collectors, the “Criterion” brand is synonymous with “quality,” with the assumption that, if the Criterion Collection thinks something is good enough to release, it must be worth watching.
That’s mostly true, even for films without the canonical status of Citizen Kane or Seven Samurai — movies that are of interest simply because of the cultural context in which they were made, or because they’re failed passion projects from otherwise successful directors, or for some other reason. And yet, because of the sheer number of Criterion releases at this point, there are those whose inclusion in the Collection remains perplexing even to die-hard cinephiles — movies that are straight-up not very good.
Even bad films are worth engaging with on some level, even just out of pure curiosity, and the films on this list certainly aren’t the end of cinema forever, but, compared to their Criterion Collection peers, these are the worst of the bunch.
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Most of the movies featured in the Criterion Collection are guaranteed to be great. Most … not all.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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