In 1976, the young architects Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp wrote an essay that took the form of a surreal short story. Set in 1923, “The Story of a Pool” is about a group of Moscow architecture students who design a floating pool—for Koolhaas, a symbol of design purity. Decades later, amid Soviet adversity, the pool eventually propels itself across the Atlantic, arriving in New York like a drifting Utopian relic. Pools have held the same kind of fascination in film. In coming-of-age portraits like Deep End and Water Lilies, they are symbols of middle-class malaise—the bodies of water are claustrophobic. In La Piscine and Sexy Beast, pools are symbols of summer and seduction, of a glittering world that exists only onscreen. In the Criterion Channel’s new series, pools are the leitmotif. Each episode covers a different movie. —Elena Clavarino