Coming in October: Welcome II the Terrordome, a radically ahead-of-its-time Afrofuturist vision from Ngozi Onwurah; The Shout, Jerzy Skolimowski’s tour de force of psychic dread; Christiane F., a harrowing portrayal of drug addiction in 1970s Berlin, directed by Uli Edel; Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s spellbinding take on an enduring modern myth; Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller, three independent films that set the stage for the director’s controversial career; and The Silence of the Lambs, a disquieting immersion into a twisted psyche, directed by Jonathan Demme and now on 4K UHD. Plus: our previously announced thirty-disc box set: The Complete Kubrick, collecting the titan of cinema’s entire directorial output for the first time.
Welcome II the Terrordome (#1329) out Oct 6
Ngozi Onwurah’s radically ahead-of-its-time dystopian sci-fi film Welcome II the Terrordome—the first theatrically distributed British feature by a Black woman—furiously evokes a near future in which Black people are segregated within a slum called the Terrordome, where simmering violence and anger threaten to boil over in the wake of a young boy’s murder. Named after an incendiary single by Public Enemy, the film uses its rap soundtrack to both comment on and drive its narrative, part of a sensibility in which American, British, and African cultures collide and the past, present, and future collapse. In this prescient work, Onwurah builds a visionary, Afrofuturist cosmology that connects the history of slavery to modern-day systemic racial brutality. The Director-Approved Special Edition Features are:
- New 2K digital restoration, supervised and approved by cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- New audio commentary featuring Küchler, director Ngozi Onwurah, and Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark
- Meet the Filmmakers: Ngozi Onwurah, a Criterion Channel original interview
- Three short films by Onwurah—Coffee Coloured Children (1988), And Still I Rise (1993), and Hang Time (2001)—with a new introduction by the director
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by poet and critic Kadish Morris
The Shout (#1331) out Oct 13
A tour de force of psychic dread that begins as an ambient murmur and builds to an existential shriek, legendary Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s provocative adaptation of a short story by Robert Graves is a hallucinatory confrontation with the unknown. In a small English village, an experimental composer (John Hurt) and his wife (Susannah York) see their routine existence upended by the arrival of an enigmatic stranger (a seductively sinister Alan Bates), who claims to possess knowledge of Aboriginal magic and the ability to kill using a deadly scream—a power that makes him an object of both terror and desire. With its puzzle-box structure, unnerving ambiguity, and otherworldly electronic sound design, this Cannes Film Festival award winner quivers with the primal fear of mysterious and uncontrollable forces. The Director-Approved Special Edition Features are:
- 2K digital restoration, approved by director Jerzy Skolimowski and director of photography Mike Molloy, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- New interviews with Skolimowski and producer Jeremy Thomas
- Excerpts from Skolimowski’s appearance at the 1997 Midnight Sun Festival
- On the Set of “The Shout,” a short UK television program from 1977
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by scholar Leo Goldsmith
Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller out Oct 13
His films have been called raw, outrageous, sensational, and daring. In four decades of directing, Samuel Fuller created a legendarily idiosyncratic oeuvre, examining U.S. history and mythmaking in westerns, film noirs, and war epics. And, characteristically, it all began with a bang: after “printing the legend” with the elegant B pictures I Shot Jesse James and The Baron of Arizona, he got himself into hot water with the FBI with The Steel Helmet, the first American movie to portray the Korean War. These three independent films—showing off Fuller’s genre diversity, gutter wit, and subversive force—set the stage for his controversial career in moviemaking. The Special Edition Features are:
Buy The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You- An essay by film critic Nick Pinkerton
The Complete Kubrick out Oct 20
A titan of cinema whose influence extends across visual art, philosophy, politics, technology, fashion, and beyond, Stanley Kubrick created an unprecedented string of masterpieces, from Paths of Glory to Dr. Strangelove to 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. Bending disparate genres to his will, he imbued his creations with a cuttingly ironic worldview and an iconographic, mesmerizingly precise visual style, probing the anxieties, enigmas, and horrors of the twentieth century with a coolly devastating eye. Tracing his evolution from independent maverick to Hollywood rebel to visionary transnational auteur whose every film from the mid-1960s on became a manifesto of a radically new sensibility, The Complete Kubrick brings together the entirety of a body of work that opened popular cinema up to new realms of moral profundity and metaphysical mystery.
Collected here for the first time are Kubrick’s thirteen features and three shorts, all restored in 4K, with their original soundtracks alongside the 5.1 mixes, restored and remastered; over twenty-five hours of interviews, documentaries, and behind-the-scenes materials; and deluxe packaging illustrated with rare photographs, artwork, and documents annotated by Kubrick himself, all housed in a singular box inspired by the director’s legendary archive. The Special Edition Features are:
Buy Kubrick: An Odyssey- 4K restorations of director Stanley Kubrick’s thirteen features and three shorts, with their original soundtracks alongside the 5.1 mixes, restored and remastered
- Kubrick’s international version of The Shining
- New 4K restoration of Vivian Kubrick’s behind-the-scenes documentary Making “The Shining”
- New audio commentaries featuring filmmaker Lee Unkrich (editor of the book Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”) and author Michael Benson (Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece)
- New conversation between novelist Jonathan Lethem and film historian Kevin Wynter on Kubrick and authorship
- Unseen Lolita screen tests with actors James Mason and Sue Lyon and rare Full Metal Jacket behind-the-scenes footage
- Archival interviews with Alexander Singer, Christiane Kubrick, Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Peter Ustinov, George C. Scott, Peter Sellers, Sue Lyon, Scatman Crothers, Kelvin Pike, John Alcott, Wendy Carlos, Douglas Trumbull, and Steven Spielberg
- Documentaries including Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001), directed by Jan Harlan and narrated by Tom Cruise; Kubrick by Kubrick (2020), told in Kubrick’s own words; Staircases to Nowhere (2013, expanded 2026), about the making of The Shining; and Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes (2008), about the trove of archival materials left behind by Kubrick
- Deluxe packaging illustrated with rare photographs, artwork, and documents annotated by Kubrick himself, all housed in a singular box inspired by the director’s legendary archive
- An essay by author and critic Nathaniel Rich
- And much more . . .
The Silence of the Lambs (#13) out Oct 20
In this chilling adaptation of the best-selling novel by Thomas Harris, the astonishingly versatile director Jonathan Demme crafted a taut psychological thriller about an American obsession: serial murder. As Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee who enlists the help of the infamous Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter to gain insight into the mind of another killer, Jodie Foster subverts classic gender dynamics and gives one of the most memorable performances of her career. As her foil, Anthony Hopkins is the archetypal antihero—cultured, quick-witted, and savagely murderous—delivering a harrowing portrait of humanity gone terribly wrong. A gripping police procedural and a disquieting immersion into a twisted psyche, The Silence of the Lambs swept the Academy Awards (Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actress, Actor) and remains a cultural touchstone. The Special Edition Features are:
Buy The Silence of the Lambs (Criterion Collection)- 4K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Tak Fujimoto, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
- Audio commentary from 1994 featuring director Jonathan Demme, actors Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, screenwriter Ted Tally, and former FBI agent John Douglas
- Interview with critic Maitland McDonagh
- Deleted scenes
- Interview from 2005 with Demme and Foster
- Four documentaries featuring hours of interviews with cast and crew
- Behind-the-scenes featurette
- Storyboards
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An introduction by Foster; two essays, one by critic Amy Taubin and one by critics Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner; pieces from 2000 and 2013 by author Thomas Harris on the origins of the character Hannibal Lecter; and a 1991 interview with Demme
Christiane F. (#1330) out Oct 20
Plunging into the 1970s Berlin underground, this unforgettable portrait stands as one of the most harrowing films ever made about drug addiction. Based on the true story of Christiane Felscherinow—whose shocking memoir made her the face of a generation of troubled German youth—this bracing dramatization follows the alienated thirteen-year-old Christiane (Natja Brunckhorst) as she goes from popping pills to shooting heroin amid West Berlin’s infamous club scene, the highs of adolescent abandon giving way to an agonizing existence on the city’s desolate margins. An instant cult sensation on account of its authentically grimy location shooting and electrifying soundtrack by David Bowie, Christiane F. remains a haunting vision of a young life in free fall. The Director-Approved Special Edition Features are:
- New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Uli Edel, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New interview with Edel
- New appreciation by filmmaker Sean Baker
- Interview from 2022 with actor Natja Brunckhorst
- Screen tests
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by scholar Hester Baer
Frankenstein (#1332) out Oct 27
Guillermo del Toro’s spellbinding take on one of the most enduring of all modern myths, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, imbues the classic tale with new depths of humanity while pushing it toward dazzling heights of gothic grandeur. Shifting between the perspectives of the brilliant but callous Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and the creature (Jacob Elordi) he fashions from flesh and then cruelly mistreats, del Toro movingly reframes the legend as a story of fathers and sons struggling to break free from cycles of trauma. A decades-in-the-making triumph of darkly ravishing visual invention and operatic storytelling, Frankenstein is a deeply personal statement from a director who has long been drawn to the realm where men and monsters merge. The Director-Approved Special Edition Features are:
- 4K digital master of the theatrical version of the film, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
- 4K digital master of Frankenstein: The Reborn Cut, a new 158-minute extended director’s cut of the film, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
- Two 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the films and special features
- New audio commentary on The Reborn Cut, featuring director Guillermo del Toro
- The Anatomy Lesson: Director’s Cut, a new documentary on the making of the film
- The Parlour, a collection of conversations on craft featuring del Toro; actors Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Oscar Isaac; cinematographer Dan Laustsen; production designer Tamara Deverell; costume designer Kate Hawley; and creature designer Mike Hill
- Q&As moderated by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and musician Patti Smith
- Interview with composer Alexandre Desplat conducted by film-music scholar Jon Burlingame
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio
- PLUS: An essay by scholar and author Christopher Frayling
