A Self-Bundling Service for Cinephiles

On November 11th, Hulu lost the Criterion Collection. The library of more than eleven hundred classic, foreign, and art-house films had been my main reason for subscribing to the popular on-demand video service, back in 2013, and I discovered its loss by accident, when I went to Hulu’s Web site to watch Louis Malle’s “My Dinner With André,” a film I had been anticipating for some time. I found it missing; and, strangely, in the drop-down menu under “Movies”—Documentaries, Genres, Hulu Movie Night, Staff Picks—there was no longer any Criterion option at all. The Criterion films that had been featured in my “Top Picks for You” buffet were also gone. Dozens of titles that had been on my watchlist: gone. Streaming content comes and goes—there are Web sites devoted to tracking which titles are scheduled to expire on Netflix each month—but it’s much rarer for a vast trove of high-quality material to vanish all at once.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Portrait of My Ego as a Big Black Dog
A New Film About Young French Women Drawn to Jihadism
Kenneth Lonergan’s Devastating, Liberating “Manchester by the Sea”