The Criterion Channel has announced the titles arriving on their platform in January 2026, and it includes collections featuring the works of Atom Egoyan, Ben Whishaw, and Terence Stamp. Plus a selection of 90s movies set in the 70s, and Criterion editions of The Ice Storm, Dazed and Confused, and Lost in America.
Not announced, but likely to be added to the Ben Whishaw collection, is the recent Janus Films release PETER HUJAR’S DAY, which is scheduled to arrive on digital on January 6th, 2026. We’ll post with any news of a Criterion Channel launch.
Here’s the full breakdown of what’s coming in January:
TOP STORIES
The ’90s Do the ’70s
In the 1990s, the twenty-year cultural cycle—in which each generation rediscovers and reinterprets the youth culture of the last—saw Gen X filmmakers turn to the 1970s for inspiration. But with more in mind than mere nostalgia, directors like Richard Linklater, Sofia Coppola, Spike Lee, and Paul Thomas Anderson used this much-mythologized decade as a lens through which to examine contemporary social concerns. Ganja-hazed, bell-bottomed youth rebellion found resonance in grunge-era slacker disaffection (Dazed and Confused, The Virgin Suicides) and the dark cynicism of the Watergate era came to inflect the end-of-history anomie of the century’s final years (Dead Presidents, The Ice Storm). By turns dreamy, gritty, and glam, these films remix the music, fashion, and cultural iconography of a pivotal era to their own incisive ends.
FEATURING: Dazed and Confused (1993)*, Carlito’s Way (1993), Dead Presidents (1995), Boogie Nights (1997), The Ice Storm (1997), The Last Days of Disco (1998), Velvet Goldmine (1998), 54 (1998), Summer of Sam (1999), The Virgin Suicides (1999)*
Fresh Starts
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.
FEATURING: Walk Cheerfully (1930), The Big City (1963), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), A New Leaf (1971), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Starting Over (1979)*, Cane River (1982), Lost in America (1985), The Green Ray (1986), Shirley Valentine (1989)*, Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
Starring Ben Whishaw
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)
Noah Baumbach’s Adventures in Moviegoing
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).
FEATURING: The 39 Steps (1935), To Be or Not to Be (1942), The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Winter Light (1963), Charulata (1964), Paper Moon (1973)*
Directed by Atom Egoyan
Featuring an interview with Egoyan, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series
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.
FEATURES: Next of Kin (1984), Family Viewing (1987), Speaking Parts (1989), The Adjuster (1991), Calendar (1993), Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Felicia’s Journey (1999)*, Where the Truth Lies (2005)*, Chloe (2009)*
SHORTS: Peep Show (1981), En passant (1991), Artaud Double Bill (2007)
Nordic Noir
The dark cloud of disillusionment that spread across international screens in the wake of World War II didn’t spare the land of the midnight sun, as evidenced by this selection of stylishly shadowy, ripe-for-discovery crime dramas from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Precursors to the Scandinavian crime-fiction boom, these moody thrillers—including Edith Carlmar’s twisted melodrama Death Is a Caress, the first Norwegian film directed by a woman; and Hasse Ekman’s daring mystery Girl with Hyacinths, fascinating for its taboo-breaking queer themes—imbue noir fatalism with a stark social realism and brooding psychological depth befitting the homeland of Ibsen and Strindberg.
FEATURING: Death Is a Caress (1949), Girl with Hyacinths (1950), Two Minutes Late (1952), Hidden in the Fog (1953)
Starring Terence Stamp
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)
Written by Dorothy Parker
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
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
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.
Blossoms Shanghai
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
Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)*
Criterion Collection Edition #336
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.
The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)
Criterion Collection Edition #426
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.
Lost in America (Albert Brooks, 1985)
Criterion Collection Edition #887
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
Three by Kleber Mendonça Filho
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 Pernambuco through the prism of cinema and architecture.
FEATURING: Neighboring Sounds (2012), Bacurau (2019), Pictures of Ghosts(2023)
William Lustig’s Maniac Pulp
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)
Directed by Hlynur Pálmason
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)
Maya Deren: Master of the Avant-Garde
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
Joan of Arc
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
Actresses Unfiltered
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 Star Is Born x3
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
Two Short Films by Dwayne LeBlanc
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)
Short Films by Jess X. Snow
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)
My Back Pages
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
Contemporary Color
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
Premiering Jan 1 in Starring Vicky Krieps: Phantom Thread*
Vicky Krieps made her breakthrough opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as an enigmatic dressmaker’s muse in Paul Thomas Anderson’s mysterious period romance.
Premiering Jan 1 in Directed by Joachim Trier: Reprise
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.
Premiering Jan 1 in Directed by Werner Herzog: Queen of the Desert
Werner Herzog teams up with Nicole Kidman for an epic biopic of adventurer Gertrude Bell.