Criterion’s been around almost 40 years. It’s the distribution platform of a company called Janus Films. They specialize in restoring older movies, indie and arthouse film and movies from different countries and releasing them here, where we would otherwise not get it.
they’re the folks who basically created the idea of “special features” in disk based media.
They were the primary distributor/Publisher during the laser disk
Criterion has also distributed films back in the day like Robocop, Armageddon, The Rock,
and They currently releasing things like the Lone Wolf and Cub (shogun assassin) series, Jackie Chan Police Story box set, Bruce Lee action set, Godzilla, Zatoichi the blind Swordsman, The Princess Bride, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Breakfast club various older wuxia action films and endless samurai movies and other stuff like that.
Their streaming channel is an arm of that. Releasing weirdo old and foreign horror and scifi films as well as older.
I don’t personally care how you acquire films. You do you.
But Judging something entirely on a name, because you have an immediate emotional reaction, without spending five minutes researching is dumb
There’s another company that does the same thing called Arrow Films. Sounds Hipstery, right? 90 Percent of their releases are horror, exploitation, action, and cult films