Streaming movies should be approached with a sense of urgency, because of the danger that a great movie that’s newly available may become unavailable once again. Though the Criterion Channel, which has recently made its ever-admirable programming even more wide-ranging and artistically ambitious, generally reissues movies that have already been released in theatres, its offering of Zeinabu irene Davis’s film “Compensation,” from 1999, could be considered a new release—as far as I can tell, it has screened only at festivals and in special series, and has never been in theatres for a consecutive week-long run. That fact alone renders its streaming availability all the more essential and stands as a vehement reproach to the film industry at large: “Compensation” is one of the greatest American independent films ever made, and its presence on the Criterion site should be a prelude to its canonization (including on DVD/Blu-ray in the Criterion Collection) as an enduring classic.