This December, make yourself at home in some of cinema’s most memorable hotels, celebrate Julianne Moore’s bracingly human performances, or explore the trailblazing debuts of Black women filmmakers. A new installment of Queersighted uncovers the hidden gay histories of Hollywood’s golden age, while our director retrospectives spotlight the romantic lyricism of Wong Kar Wai, the novelistic human dramas of Joachim Trier, and the furiously angry action spectacles of Ringo Lam. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including Bi Gan’s visionary mind-benders, Med Hondo’s inventive anticolonial agit-prop, Susan Sontag’s unclassifiable directorial debut, and the proto-Bollywood epic Mother India.

TOP STORIES

Check in and stay a while in some of cinema’s most iconic hotels, where souls in transit meet, identities shift, and the by turns liberating and lonely experience of being far from home heightens every interaction. From the gilded art deco glamour of Grand Hotel to the haunted corridors of The Shining’s surreally sinister Overlook Hotel to the moody, lamplit luxury of Lost in Translation’s sleek Tokyo high-rise, these films make unforgettable use of the liminal spaces where disparate lives intersect and every door opens onto another story.

FEATURING: Grand Hotel (1932), Hôtel du Nord (1938), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Bellboy (1960)*, 8½ (1963), Hotel Monterey (1972), What’s Up, Doc? (1972), The Night Porter (1974), The Shining (1980), Nightshift (1981), Insignificance (1985), Mystery Train (1989), Barton Fink (1991), Four Rooms (1995)*, New Rose Hotel (1998), The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), Lost in Translation (2003), Somewhere (2010), Anomalisa (2015)*

Boasting one of the most compelling and adventurous filmographies of any actor working in Hollywood today, Julianne Moore has made consistently bold choices in a career that has moved easily between blockbuster hits and art-house passion projects. Working with auteurs like Todd Haynes, David Cronenberg, and Alfonso Cuarón, Moore brings psychological nuance and fascinatingly layered ambiguity to her celebrated portrayals of women on the edge: a suburban housewife confronting the pervasive dread of modern existence in Safe; a wife and mother struggling to keep up appearances under the stifling pressures of 1950s domesticity in both The Hours and Far from Heaven; a fading actress clinging desperately to fame in Maps to the Stars. Moore imbues them all with a deep human longing that registers with precision across her infinitely expressive face.

FEATURING: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), Body of Evidence (1993), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), Nine Months (1995), Safe (1995), Psycho (1998), The End of the Affair (1999), Far from Heaven (2002), The Hours (2002), Children of Men (2006), A Single Man (2009), Maps to the Stars (2014), Maggie’s Plan (2015)*

Featuring a conversation between authors Michael Koresky and Mark Harris

“Sexual perversion, and any inference to it, is strictly forbidden.” Thus spoke the Hollywood Production Code, the system of censorship that defined the limits of the permissible during the studio system’s golden age from the 1930s to the ’60s. According to such dictates, queer people simply didn’t exist. Nevertheless, during the decades of the Code at its most draconian, movies with gay and lesbian themes, undercurrents, and unmistakable desire made it to the screen. The new book Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, by Queersighted series programmer Michael Koresky, takes a close look at this history. In this conversation, Koresky invites author Mark Harris (Pictures at a Revolution) to discuss a selection of classic films from this rich, complicated period in American cinema, in which writers like Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Suddenly, Last Summer), and directors such as Dorothy Arzner (Dance, Girl, Dance) and Vincente Minnelli (Tea and Sympathy) left a subversive, unmistakably queer mark on their films despite the Code. 

FEATURING: These Three (1936), Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), Crossfire (1947), A Star Is Born (1954), Tea and Sympathy (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), The Children’s Hour (1961)

As his unmissable television epic Blossoms Shanghai comes to the Criterion Channel, immerse yourself in the woozy world of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai, whose lush visuals, swooning soundtracks, and wistful romanticism have made him one of contemporary cinema’s defining artists. Working with key collaborators like actors Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung Man Yuk, celebrated cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and virtuoso editor and production and costume designer William Chang Suk Ping, Wong has created some of cinema’s most rapturous, stylistically daring explorations of alienation, memory, and longing. From the soulful science-fiction romance 2046 to the dazzlingly stylized kung fu epic The Grandmaster, the films collected here are an invitation to the sublime cinematic cosmos of a true visionary.

FEATURING: As Tears Go By (1988), Days of Being Wild (1990), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), The Hand (2004), 2046 (2004), My Blueberry Nights (2007)*, The Grandmaster (2013)

Though their voices have historically been marginalized, innovative Black women filmmakers have long broken barriers to tell urgent, powerful, and perceptive stories on-screen. This celebration of pioneering Black women who made an impact with their very first—and in some cases only—feature film reveals a rich lineage of artists whose works open up into fascinating dialogue with one another. Exploring themes of revolutionary and anticolonialist struggle (Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga, Sara Gómez’s One Way or Another), the experience of coming of age as a young Black woman (Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso, Dee Rees’s Pariah), and the meaning of heritage and history (Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation), these uniquely insightful, formally imaginative works are each an act of courageous dedication and vision.

Programmed by Rógan Graham, who presented a version of Black Debutantes at London’s BFI Southbank in May 2025. 

FEATURING: Sambizanga (1972), One Way or Another (1977), Will (1981), Losing Ground (1982), Daughters of the Dust (1991), Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992), Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), Naked Acts (1996), The Watermelon Woman (1996), Eve’s Bayou (1997), Drylongso (1998), Compensation (1999), Pariah (2011), I Am Not a Witch (2017)*, Pretty Red Dress (2022)

Featuring a new interview with Trier, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

With six features—including his acclaimed latest, Sentimental Value—to his name, Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier has established himself as one of the most virtuosic directors working today, a humanist who brings novelistic depth and insight to his intimate portraits of people grappling with everyday existential crises. Particularly attuned to the messy emotional realities of young people navigating the turbulence of early adulthood, his films—including the haunting portrait of a day in the life of an addict Oslo, August 31st; the quietly powerful family drama Louder Than Bombs; and the spellbinding supernatural thriller/queer love story Thelma—vividly capture the full spectrum of the human experience, from the crushing lows to the exhilarating highs.

FEATURING: Oslo, August 31st (2011)*, Louder Than Bombs (2015), Thelma (2017)

COMING JANUARY 1: Reprise (2006)

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

New episodes every Monday at 8 p.m. ET

In 1990s Shanghai, fortunes are waiting to be made—but not everyone can be a winner. In his first-ever television series, legendary director Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love) orchestrates a sprawling cast of stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, bureaucrats, schemers, and dreamers riding the wave of market reform in the wake of the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s historic reopening. At the center is the daring self-made trader Ah Bao (Hu Ge), whose increasingly risky business maneuvers intertwine his fate with those of three women, each with her own ambitions. Luxuriating in Shanghai's food, fashion, and language, Wong delivers an exuberant love letter to his birthplace. A massively popular hit in China, Blossoms Shanghai is an intoxicating epic tinged with Wong’s signature romanticism.

DECEMBER 1: Episodes 4, 5, 6

DECEMBER 8: Episodes 7, 8, 9

DECEMBER 15: Episodes 10, 11, 12

DECEMBER 22: Episodes 13, 14, 15

DECEMBER 29: Episodes 16, 17, 18

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

A child’s-eye fable of innocence lost unfolds amid the hardscrabble reality of life on the streets of 1940s Rome in one of the miracles of Italian neorealism.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Sciuscià 70 (2016), a documentary by Mimmo Verdesca, made to mark the film’s seventieth anniversary; a program on Shoeshine and Italian neorealism featuring film scholars Paola Bonifazio and Catherine O’Rawe; and more.

A Los Angeles housewife’s picture-perfect life crumbles when she develops what seems to be a disturbing allergy to modern existence—but is it all in her head?

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Todd Haynes, actor Julianne Moore, and producer Christine Vachon; a conversation between Haynes and Moore; and more.

“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” In 1960s Louisiana, a young girl sees her well-to-do family unravel in the wake of her philandering father’s infidelities.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Kasi Lemmons, cinematographer Amy Vincent, producer Caldecot Chubb, and editor Terilyn A. Shropshire; interviews with Lemmons and composer Terence Blanchard; and more.

A Brooklyn teenager navigates the emotional minefields of first love, heartache, and rejection on her journey toward embracing her lesbian identity.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A conversation between director Dee Rees and filmmaker and professor Michelle Parkerson, a cast reunion, a program on the making of the film, and more.

Four people who look a lot like Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Joseph McCarthy converge in one Manhattan hotel room in this fun-house mirror image of fifties America. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A short making-of documentary and interviews with director Nicolas Roeg, producer Jeremy Thomas, and editor Tony Lawson.

In Liliana Cavani’s unsettling drama, a concentration-camp survivor discovers her former torturer working at a hotel in postwar Vienna and attempts to re-create their sadomasochistic relationship.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An interview with Cavani and her 1965 documentary Women of the Resistance. 

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Susan Sontag made her directorial debut with this definition-defying, dryly funny psychological serio-comedy, a project that began when a Swedish studio invited her to make a film in Stockholm. The result, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an arrogant ex-revolutionist German intellectual exile, his elegant wife, their Swedish student secretary, and the earnest secretary’s bride-to-be, is a roundelay of partner-swapping that gradually drifts into gamesmanship that broaches the surreal and violent. Defying literal-minded interpretation, Duet for Cannibals is both an illustrative companion to Sontag’s criticism and an introduction to a startlingly original filmmaker.

Scripted by Ingmar Bergman with the fearlessness of an artist taking stock of his life and masterfully directed one of his greatest collaborators, the actor Liv Ullmann, Faithless is a wrenching, intensely psychological examination of infidelity in which the late Swedish auteur channels his personal demons into the character of “Bergman” (Erland Josephson), an aging director who summons the imaginary actress Marianne (an extraordinary Lena Endre) to help him write his latest script. With riveting emotional honesty, Marianne recounts the story of how she fell into an extramarital affair with a close family friend, a relationship that has devastating consequences not only for her and her husband, but their daughter as well. 

In many ways the mother of the Bollywood epic, this landmark of Indian cinema is a breathtaking blend of melodrama, musical, Soviet-style socialist realism, and nationalist mythmaking centered around Radha (superstar Nargis in one of her most iconic roles), a young mother abandoned by her husband who must weather all manner of hardships—debt, poverty, natural disasters, and the untoward advances of men—as she fights to raise her two sons while holding on to her dignity and uncompromising moral code. The first Indian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, this box-office sensation and enduring cultural touchstone is the story not only of one woman’s resilience but also of a newly independent India’s quest for self-determination. 

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Emerging from the creative rebellion of the New Queer Cinema movement, Todd Haynes has remained one of American independent cinema’s most daring and subversive voices, a master stylist who uses his command of the language of classic melodrama to reveal the hidden fears, anxieties, and hypocrisies lurking beneath the surface of American society. Establishing his fiercely transgressive sensibility with his visually intoxicating, Jean Genet–inspired provocation Poison, he reached ever greater heights of critical acclaim with the disturbing psychological drama Safe and the lush, Sirkian melodrama Far from Heaven, both featuring riveting performances from Julianne Moore as suburban housewives whose picture-perfect worlds crumble around them.

FEATURING: Poison (1991), Safe (1995), Far from Heaven (2002)

Among the politically committed African filmmakers who emerged in the postcolonial era, Mauritanian-French firebrand Med Hondo stood as one of the boldest and most provocative voices, forging a fiercely experimental style all his own to examine the historical toll of colonial oppression on generations of African people. Employing radical agit-prop, freewheeling avant-garde experimentation, and incisive satire, his films—including the explosive portrait of immigrant alienation Soleil Ô, the innovative musical West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, and the feminist historical epic Sarraounia—point the way toward a truly decolonized cinema of liberation.

FEATURING: Soleil Ô (1970), West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979), Sarraounia (1986)

Featuring a new introduction by author Grady Hendrix, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

Raw, gritty, intensely angry visions of individuals pushed to the brink by a corrupt society, the films of Hong Kong action renegade Ringo Lam scorch the screen with an anarchic fury. His action classic City on Fire offered Chow Yun-fat one of his meatiest roles and inspired Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. With his further entries in the “On Fire” series, Lam doubled down on social criticism without stinting on the action, offering a searing portrait of systemic moral breakdown.

FEATURING: City on Fire (1987), Prison on Fire (1987), School on Fire (1988), Prison on Fire II (1991)

Featuring a new introduction by scholar Terri Simone Francis, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

With her landmark debut feature Will, pioneering cameraperson turned filmmaker (and all-around Renaissance woman) Jessie Maple became one of the first Black American women to direct an independent feature film, bringing unflinching honesty and stirring emotion to an endearingly tough and tender portrait of a Harlem heroin addict striving to turn his life around. Though she directed only one other feature—Twice as Nice, a vibrant tale of twin sisters competing in college basketball to become the first professional draft pick—Maple blazed a trail that would allow a rising generation of Black women filmmakers to tell their own community’s stories on-screen.

FEATURING: Will (1981), Twice as Nice (1989)

On the occasion of the theatrical release of his highly anticipated third feature Resurrection, journey into the mesmerizing world of Bi Gan, the Chinese auteur whose labyrinthine, dreamlike narratives and immersive, mind-bogglingly epic long takes have rapidly established him as one of contemporary cinema’s most exciting voices. His dazzling ambition is already on full display in his debut feature, Kaili Blues, an audacious time-slipping odyssey through rural China’s past, present, and future built around an astonishing forty-one-minute outdoor tracking shot. It’s surpassed only by the fifty-nine-minute unbroken take that concludes Long Day’s Journey into Night, a hallucinatory neonoir voyage into the unconscious mind.

FEATURING: Kaili Blues (2015), Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018)

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

Three journalists invited to Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge begin to discover the hidden horrors lurking beneath the idyllic image that has been manufactured for them.

Fantasy, poetry, and history flow into one another as a sailor embarks on a sublime metaphysical odyssey along China’s Yangtze River.

ANIME

On Christmas Eve on the margins of Tokyo, the lives of three lost souls are changed forever when they rescue an abandoned baby.

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Christian Bale is iconically unhinged as a sociopathic uber-yuppie whose high-powered Wall Street lifestyle conceals murderous impulses.

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

Crime hits devastatingly close to home for two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) entangled in a larcenous scheme gone wrong.

A troubled teen (Jake Gyllenhaal) must deal with the stresses of both adolescence and the oncoming apocalypse in this mind-altering cult classic.

The lives of two closely entwined couples are upended by a domino effect of mutually destructive extramarital affairs in this unflinching exploration of infidelity.

INTERNATIONAL CLASSICS

A chance romantic meeting on a London train could change a woman’s life forever—but what if it never happened?

SHORT FILMS

Poignant impressions from more than a decade in the life of a young first-generation Afghan Canadian man show him in the process of coming into his queer identity.

Beloved actor Carol Kane and her ninety-eight-year-old mother, musician and former dancer Joy, invite you into their Upper West Side home for a lively afternoon of music and poignant reminiscences.

DOCUMENTARIES

Sri Lankan British filmmaker Chloe Abrahams untangles painful knots in her family’s unspoken past, revealing the complicated ties that bind three generations of extraordinary women.

This illuminating journey through Iranian cinema celebrates the fearless filmmakers and activists who have defied censorship and repression to make their voices heard.

MUSIC FILMS

Assembled from the video diary shot by late Blind Melon singer Shannon Hoon, this kaleidoscopic collage is a journey through addiction and sudden fame in the world of nineties alternative rock.

Discover the artistic journey and uncompromising creative vision of the most enigmatic figure in rock history as he returns to the studio to record his magnum opus.

Eye-popping musical performances and intimate personal footage come together in an electrifying journey through the public and private worlds of a musical icon.

Take a breezy tour through the vibrant pop-culture playground of 1980s Tokyo as experienced by a wannabe American rocker vying for her shot at stardom.