Back in my university days, I majored in film production, which seemed like an awfully good idea at the time (later in life I started to emphasize the word ‘awfully’ instead of ‘good’). During our freshman year, we had to take two semesters of film history, which makes sense, because how can you create “art” without understanding its commercial aesthetic and what came before? The problem was timing – the class met every Monday morning at 9am. That’s right, every Monday, still hung over from the weekend, we had to drag ourselves into a movie theatre and watch a classic film. I figured that would be no problem: I’d just drag myself downtown on time, put my feet up on the seat in front of me, close my eyes and sleep my way through cinematic history. Except the professor was two steps ahead of us – in the first semester all the films he screened were silent and in the second everything was foreign language with sub-titles. And, of course, back in those days, there was no Blockbuster or Netflix, no home video at all, so there was no way to catch up if you missed something.

So I spent four months being introduced to the works of the great silent comedians – Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle, Harold Lloyd – and also the serious dramatic works, especially of cinema’s first great pioneers, D W Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as a film that has remained burned vividly in my mind from the first time I saw it, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. In the second semester, the focus was on European films, from German expressionism to Italian and French new wave – Rossellini, Truffaut, Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, with a pinch of Kurosawa on top for good measure. Growing up on a strict diet of Cagney and Bogart gangster films and Busby Berkeley musicals, I’d never even heard of these directors before, but they instantly became my new heroes, not merely for delving into the human condition but for offering me glimpses into foreign cultures, and giving me my first chance to see how those cultures saw mine.

I think the best thing about seeing those films in a classroom environment was the way the professor was able to put each in the perspective of its era. One of the most difficult things in the world is to be able to go back and see in the original film something distinctive that has become a cliché after 50,000 other films copied it.

As an example, take Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic French suspense film Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear). Four men drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerine through a South American jungle. One bump too many and all that would be left would be a crater. In one great scene they have to drive over a bumpy stretch of road known as ‘the washboard’. If they can keep those rotting old trucks above 40 miles per hour, they’ll fly over the bumps; slow down just a bit and they’re burnt toast. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all seen Speed – it's a cartoon next to this with its amped-up sound effects and Dennis Hopper’s scene-chewing villainy. Le Salaire de la Peur is in black and white (gorgeous black and white, by the way) and without MTV-style rapid-fire editing. You see the men in the trucks (including a young Yves Montand at the top of his game) drenched in sweat, you see the speedometer, you listen to the dialogue. If you’re in the right frame of mind when you watch this, you’ll chew your fingernails down to your elbows. But if you’re a kid raised on Transformers, you’ll be reaching for your PSP before the scene’s even halfway finished. (And by the way, the first hour of Wages of Fear features the best depiction I’ve ever seen of down-on-their-luck expats stuck in a dead-end no-horse town, spending their days drinking in bars, daydreaming of a big score just around the corner.)

Of course not everyone is crazy enough to sit through hours of lectures on film theory and aesthetics just so they can place in the top 20% of the class and get their parents to buy them a car. And now we’ve got (what remains of) a home-video industry, pumping out discs and fighting for shelf space. But it stands to reason that most of your DVD choices are going to be the same cinematic junk diet the major studios are forcefeeding our local shoeboxes (oops, cinemas!).

So thank the cosmic muffin for Criterion, an American company that has been releasing spectacular special-edition films on video since 1984. A distribution and not a production company, Criterion specializes in licensing films, then going out and scouring the world (and probably your mom’s basement) for the best possible source print. They spend way more money and time than any rational person would creating as perfect a video transfer as can be made. And then they come up with bonus features that don’t consist of two minutes of the actors lying about how much they loved working with each other intercut with 20 minutes of clips from the movie you’ve already seen. Their bonus features illuminate the films more vividly than my old college professor ever did.

You want great directors? They’ve got classics by Renoir, Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, John Woo, Godard, David Lean, Terry Gilliam, Buñuel, Tati, Wong Kar-Wai – the list goes on and on. And knowing that man does not live by foie gras alone, they also offer the crème de la crème of Japanese exploitation films, Samuel Fuller, The Blob and The Honeymoon Killers.

Let me give you just a few examples of what they do, starting with a film that belongs in every home library – Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The video transfer is flawless, so clean and detailed you’d think you were watching a film made last year instead of 55 years ago. Of two audio commentaries, one is by a roundtable of five film critics including renowned Japanese cinema expert Donald Richie, the second by Michael Jeck. A 50-minute documentary on the making of the film is matched with a two-hour video conversation between Kurosawa and filmmaker Nagisa Oshima and another documentary on samurai traditions. And if that’s not enough, the film comes with a 60-page book with essays from Kenneth Turan, Sidney Lumet and others. After you’ve absorbed all that, you’re ready to teach your own master class on the subject.

A personal favourite of mine is a three-disc edition of Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece, Brazil. You get Gilliam’s 142-minute director’s cut, which distributor Universal refused to release in the US and Universal’s own 94-minute re-edit in which they even changed the ending! An original 60-minute documentary titled The Battle of Brazil, which details the war between Gilliam and the studio, comes together with short features on the script, production and costume design, special effects and music.

Among the American directors eager to work with Criterion on their ‘Director Approved’ editions, the latest is David Fincher, one of the best filmmakers currently working in Hollywood. Regardless of what you think of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (I liked but didn’t love it), it is a tremendous technical achievement and the Blu-Ray set just released by Criterion not only features a commentary by Fincher and a sumptuously beautiful transfer but also a second disc that delves into the creative decisions and technical innovations that served to make this one of the most notable films of 2008.

So the next time you go to the video store and it seems like everything on display is a variation on the theme of Spiderpants vs Batshit, look for the Criterion section, usually hidden in the rear of the store. Pick a film you’ve never heard of – maybe you like the title or the picture on the cover. Perhaps you’ll end up with a bizarre Japanese exploitation film like Pigs and Battleships by Shohei Imamura or maybe you’ll come across Max Ophuls’ heartbreaking The Earrings of Madame de… or Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth or Spike Lee’s explosive Do the Right Thing, but whatever you choose, the odds are you’ll be taking home a great film that teaches you there’s quite a bit more going on in cinema than you ever suspected.