Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale may have originally been conceived of as a propaganda film about Anglo-American friendship, but it ended up being so much more: it’s one of few films to which applying the epithet “transcendent” doesn’t seem like exaggeration. Made in 1944, but set in the English countryside a year before, the film stars American John Sweet (billed as “Sergt. John Sweet, U.S. Army”), Sheila Sim and Dennis Price as a trio of unlikely pilgrims who find themselves in a small English town along the road to Canterbury.

The three strangers get caught up pursuing a mysterious criminal who (in a perverse touch) has been spilling glue on local girls’ heads, and there’s not much more to be said about the movie’s admittedly weird, loose plot, except for the obvious allusions to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The film has a strange, beautiful sense of the pastoral and the English countryside, a really sweet sadness, that’s just enchanting.

Criterion’s new double-disc edition of this previously hard-to-find film includes interviews with the actors, documentaries, as well as beautiful restoration of the film itself. —Mark Slutsky