This January, savor multiple levels of nostalgia with a survey of ’90s cinema’s riffs on the ’70s, or turn a new page with a collection of films about dreamers seeking fresh starts in life. Noah Baumbach shares the story of his life at the movies in a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing, while a selection of Ben Whishaw’s magnetic performances highlights the range and intelligence of the Peter Hujar’s Day star. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including retrospectives dedicated to Maya Deren and Atom Egoyan, pulp nightmares from William Lustig, three films by The Secret Agent director Kleber Mendonça Filho, and a sampler of movies scripted by the legendary Dorothy Parker.

If you haven’t signed up yet, head to CriterionChannel.com and get a 7-day free trial.

TOP STORIES

With the start of a new year comes the restless, romantic wish to be reborn. In these portraits of dreamers, outsiders, and risk-takers, characters yearning for renewal seek reinvention through everything from the promise of new love (Sleepless in Seattle) to taboo-breaking social and sexual exploration (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) to the freedom and adventure of life on the road (Lost in America). Capturing both the exhilaration of starting again and the messy realities that come with the process, these films are a testament to the all-too-human impulse to begin again.

One of the most thoughtful and quietly compelling actors working today, Ben Whishaw—currently nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award for his lead performance in Peter Hujar’s Day—projects a soulful sensitivity and soft-spoken intensity in his emotionally layered portrayals of dreamers, misfits, and romantics. Whether embodying the quixotic yearning of poet John Keats in Bright Star, the heartbreaking vulnerability of a young man grieving his boyfriend’s death in Lilting, or the wild punk swagger of renegade Russian writer Eduard Limonov in Limonov: The Ballad, Whishaw is never less than riveting, conveying deep recesses of thought and feeling with understated precision.

FEATURING: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)*, Brideshead Revisited (2008)*, Bright Star (2009)*, Lilting (2014), Limonov: The Ballad (2024)

Growing up in New York City as the son of two writers, director Noah Baumbach had a unique exposure to a wide range of cinema—from classic swashbucklers to French New Wave masterpieces—from an early age. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, the Jay Kelly director sits down with Criterion president Peter Becker to discuss those formative cinematic experiences. The films he has chosen to present include graceful comedies from Ernst Lubitsch (To Be or Not to Be) and Jacques Tati (Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday) as well as exquisitely subtle, humanistic marriage stories from Yasujiro Ozu (The Flavor of Green Tea  over Rice) and Satyajit Ray (Charulata).

The formally adventurous and psychologically intricate films of ever-fascinating Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan unfold according to complex, time-scrambling structures that heighten their searing emotional impact. Exploring issues of identity (including his own Armenian heritage), loss, alienation, and technology, Egoyan’s films frequently revolve around people struggling to make sense of their own shattered sense of self in the wake of profound personal tragedies. His provocative themes and elliptical style are on display in early critical triumphs like Family Viewing and Speaking Parts and reach new heights of virtuosity in the riveting psychological dramas Felicia’s Journey, Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter, the last of which has been hailed as one of the greatest Canadian films of all time.

Though his piercing blue eyes and tousled hair made him a defining sex symbol of swinging-sixties Britain, Terence Stamp was more than just a pretty face—he was a transfixing screen presence who brought an unmatched elegance, restraint, and existential gravity to works by some of the defining directors of the twentieth century. His brooding intensity and enigmatic, sometimes sinister ambiguity are on display in this selection of career highlights, which include his celebrated performances for Italian auteurs Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema) and Federico Fellini (Toby Dammit) from his ’60s heyday as well as later triumphs in acclaimed crime dramas by Steven Soderbergh (The Limey) and Stephen Frears (The Hit).

FEATURING: Toby Dammit (1968), Teorema (1968), The Hit (1984), The Limey (1999)

With a wit as dry as the martinis she famously loved, celebrated writer Dorothy Parker was a legend of the Jazz Age New York intelligentsia. Less well remembered is the time she spent in Hollywood as a screenwriter, where she brought her bitingly satirical voice and gift for delightfully dagger-like dialogue to a precious handful of films, including the beloved 1937 version of the ultimate Hollywood-on-Hollywood backstage drama A Star Is Born, the breezy comic murder mystery Trade Winds, and the elegantly caustic Oscar Wilde adaptation The Fan.

FEATURING: A Star Is Born (1937), Trade Winds (1938), The Fan (1949)

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

A sumptuous, spellbinding anti-biopic as provocative and elusive as its subject, this hypnotic journey through the world of Caribbean surrealist writer and anticolonial activist Suzanne Césaire daringly deconstructs the process of bringing an actually lived life to film. In the sleepy palm groves of the tropics, a small group of filmmakers—including an actor and new mother (Zita Hanrot) haunted by voices as she embarks on inhabiting the title role—stage scenes from the enigmatic intellectual’s life, exploring her youth in Martinique, literary legacy, and relationship with her husband, the writer and politician Aimé Césaire. Inspired by the structures of Suzanne Césaire’s own writing, which often took a colonial convention and unraveled it, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire plants us firmly in the darkness and desire of its subject while acknowledging the impossibility of resuscitating a legacy partially lost to time.

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.

JANUARY 5
Episodes 19, 20, 21 

JANUARY 12
Episodes 22, 23, 24 

JANUARY 19
Episodes 25, 26, 27 

JANUARY 26
Episodes 28, 29, 30

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

Bongs blaze, bell-bottoms ring, and rock and roll rocks in Richard Linklater’s endlessly quotable snapshot of the 1970s high school experience.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Linklater, a documentary on the making of the film, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, and more.

Two suburban Connecticut families try to navigate a Thanksgiving break simmering with unspoken resentment, sexual tension, and cultural confusion.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Ang Lee and producer-screenwriter James Schamus, a documentary featuring interviews with the cast, deleted scenes, and more.

A yuppie couple chuck it all and hit the open road in search of freedom in Albert Brooks’s uproarious satire of the Reagan-era American Dream.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A conversation between Brooks and filmmaker Robert Weide and interviews with actor Julie Hagerty, executive producer Herb Nanas, and filmmaker and screenwriter James L. Brooks.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

As his acclaimed latest The Secret Agent comes to theaters, catch up with the bold, gripping, and fearlessly political cinema of Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Fusing slow-burn suspense with incisive social commentary, his features Neighboring Sounds and Bacurau (the latter codirected with Juliano Dornelles) twist genre conventions into subversive explorations of class conflict, urban transformation, and the lingering legacy of colonial violence, while his deeply personal documentary Pictures of Ghosts is a poetic journey through the history of Mendonça’s home city of Recife through the prism of cinema and architecture.

FEATURING: Neighboring Sounds (2012), Bacurau (2019), Pictures of Ghosts (2023)

Raw, nightmarish transmissions from the unholy depths of the New York City underground, the films of revered cult auteur William Lustig are thrillingly intense, shockingly visceral plunges into the darkest chasms of urban existence. Pulsing with kinetic energy, his grindhouse opuses Maniac, Vigilante, and the Maniac Cop series are gritty, startlingly brutal visions of crime, corruption, and revenge that have cemented his status as an exploitation legend whose influence continues to reverberate through genre cinema.

FEATURING: Maniac (1980), Vigilante (1982), Maniac Cop (1988), Maniac Cop 2 (1990), Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1992)

Featuring an interview with Pálmason, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

The expansive, wintry landscapes of rural Iceland and Denmark provide the majestic physical and psychological backdrops to the breathtaking films of director Hlynur Pálmason, whose acclaimed latest, The Love That Remains, comes to theaters in January. Whether capturing the rift that forms between two brothers working in an isolated limestone quarry in his intense feature debut Winter Brothers or the arduous journey of a Danish priest across nineteenth-century Iceland in his painterly epic Godland, Pálmason’s films employ a sensorially rich visual lyricism to probe profound questions of faith, masculinity, time’s passage, and the human relationship to nature.

FEATURING: Winter Brothers (2017), Godland (2022), Nest (2022), Joan of Arc (2025)

The barrier between waking and dreaming dissolves in the ecstatic, trancelike films of Maya Deren, a legend of the avant-garde who rewrote the rules of cinema in the name of uncompromising personal expression. Combining symbol-laden imagery, intricately choreographed camera movements, time- and space-expanding editing, dance, and ritual, Deren tapped into tantalizing realms of the unconscious in defining works like Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time, giving rapturous visual form to complex psychological states and inspiring a new generation of experimental filmmakers to express their own innermost dreams and desires on-screen.

SHORTS: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), The Private Life of a Cat (1946), Meditation on Violence (1948), The Very Eye of Night (1955)

FEATURES: Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1993)

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

In Hlynur Pálmason’s at once rigorous and poetic companion piece to his feature The Love That Remains, the director chronicles his own children as they craft a knight-like figure in the remote Icelandic wilderness—only to ultimately unleash a barrage of arrows upon it. Through the changing seasons, we observe their lives as they both construct and demolish their lifelike creation.

DOCUMENTARIES

Uniquely unguarded glimpses of some of the twentieth century’s most captivating personalities, these probing portraits of legendary actresses unfold as intimate exchanges between director and subject, offering rare behind-the-scenes access to their inner worlds. Capturing vulnerable, unpredictable, and reflective moments with pop-culture supernovas like Eartha Kitt (All by Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story) and Romy Schneider (Romy: Anatomy of a Face) as well as underground legends like Factory scene icon Tally Brown (Tally Brown, New York), these candid documentaries look beyond industry-manufactured glamour to reveal deeper truths with genuine empathy and curiosity.

Programmed by Melissa Anderson

FEATURING: Romy: Anatomy of a Face (1967), Tally Brown, New York (1979), Be Pretty and Shut Up! (1981), All by Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story (1982), Fassbinder’s Women (2000)

HOLLYWOOD HITS

A story so beloved it’s been brought to the screen again and again, A Star Is Born is a timeless parable of fame, ambition, sacrifice, and the inner workings of the Hollywood machine as seen through the eyes of an up-and-coming actress torn between her burgeoning career and her love for her self-destructive husband. It’s also been a vehicle for unforgettable performances from era-defining stars: Janet Gaynor and Fredric March in William A. Wellman’s poignant 1937 Technicolor drama; Judy Garland and James Mason in George Cukor’s showstopping 1954 musical spectacular; and Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in the 1976 box-office smash, which sets the story in the world of rock ’n’ roll. 

FEATURING: A Star Is Born (1937), A Star Is Born (1954), A Star Is Born (1976)

SHORT FILMS

In his acclaimed short films, Caribbean American director Dwayne LeBlanc has shown himself to be a rising talent already in full control of mood, tone, and visual texture. His mesmerizing Civic and its gorgeous follow-up, Now, Hear Me Good, each center on a young man named Booker (played by Barrington Darius) as he drifts through encounters with acquaintances from both his hometown in South Central LA and his new life far away, capturing complex feelings around homecoming, identity, place, and dislocation through richly evocative, beautifully burnished images.

FEATURING: Civic (2022), Now, Hear Me Good (2025)

The exquisitely textured, sensorially immersive films of Chinese Canadian artist and filmmaker Jess X. Snow are works of immense heart and healing, opening up a compassionate, imaginative dreamspace in which queer Asian American characters seek liberation from social and familial trauma through everything from the transformative power of drag to the supernatural experiences of teleportation and spiritual release. Suffused with gorgeous light, color, and stirring magical-realist images, Snow’s films honor the struggle and courage it takes to live authentically.

FEATURING: Safe Among Stars (2019), Little Sky (2021), I Wanna Become the Sky (2023), Roots That Reach Toward the Sky (2024)

Meet the world’s foremost collector of Bob Dylan memorabilia as he prepares to say goodbye to the ephemera he spent a lifetime amassing.

MUSIC FILMS

Legendary musician David Byrne celebrates the creativity of color guard with a one-of-a-kind live spectacular featuring music by St. Vincent, Ad-Rock, Dev Hynes, and others.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Vicky Krieps made her breakthrough opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as an enigmatic dressmaker’s muse in Paul Thomas Anderson’s mysterious period romance.

The Sentimental Value director’s first feature crackles with a fresh, nouvelle vague–inspired energy as it traces the evolving friendship between two literary-minded twentysomethings who dream of becoming successful writers.

Werner Herzog teams up with Nicole Kidman for an epic biopic of adventurer Gertrude Bell.