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Here’s the full breakdown:
*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.
TOP STORIES
’80s Remakes (and Their Originals!)
As a new generation of movie-mad directors emerged in the 1980s, they drew direct inspiration from the films they grew up watching and obsessing over. The result was a striking run of idiosyncratic Reagan-era remakes in which filmmakers such as John Carpenter (turning the Cold War sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World into a glacial descent into existential terror), Paul Schrader (transforming the shadowy horror landmark Cat People into a hypnotic vision of erotic obsession), and Jim McBride (reimagining Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave bombshell Breathless as a neon-soaked rock ’n’ roll reverie) breathed new life into familiar stories. Viewed side by side, these films reveal a decade in provocative dialogue with the past, infusing timeless originals with the aesthetics, politics, and cultural permissiveness of a new era.
REMAKES: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Cat People (1982), The Thing (1982),* Breathless (1983), The Man Who Loved Women (1983), Against All Odds (1984), No Way Out (1987), D.O.A. (1988), We’re No Angels (1989)*
ORIGINALS: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Cat People (1942), The Thing from Another World (1951), Breathless (1960), The Man Who Loved Women (1977), Out of the Past (1947), The Big Clock (1948)*, D.O.A. (1949), We’re No Angels (1955)*
Office Romances
Beginning in the 1930s, the ever-growing number of working women inspired a new type of romantic comedy, where meet-cutes come amid desks and typewriters, and the course of true love is entangled with office politics and professional rivalry. The genre was tailor-made for stars like Jean Arthur, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell who could dazzle with brainy repartee and make competence sexy. Elements of these films may be quaintly transgressive (boozy office parties! bosses dating their secretaries!), but they also tackle still-timely topics—work-life balance (His Girl Friday), gender equality (Woman of the Year), and even fears of jobs being eliminated by computers (Desk Set)—with crackling comic irreverence, finding laughter and romance in the nine-to-five.
FEATURING: The Office Wife (1930), Working Girls (1931), Man Wanted (1932), The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), More Than a Secretary (1936), His Girl Friday(1940), Woman of the Year (1942), Desk Set (1957), The Apartment (1960)
David Chase’s Adventures in Moviegoing
As a writer-director, producer, and creator of The Sopranos, David Chase has left an indelible imprint on popular culture, revolutionizing the art of television by bringing a boldly cinematic sensibility to the small screen. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he sits down with crime-fiction author Megan Abbott to discuss his formative cinematic experiences—from his early memories of the classic gangster movies that would influence his work to the filmmaker he considers his “first director crush”—as well as the selection of favorites he has chosen to present, including a jazz-inflected crime thriller by Louis Malle (Elevator to the Gallows) and a freewheeling Italian road comedy (Il sorpasso).
FEATURING: L’Atalante (1934), Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Viridiana (1961), Il sorpasso (1962), Lacombe, Lucien (1974)
You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema
Born from a period of intense political upheaval, these radical Caribbean films spotlight vital stories of workers’ movements, decolonial struggle, and liberation from economic exploitation and violent oppression. Including urgent, on-the-ground accounts of revolutionary movements (Haiti: The Way to Freedom, Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us), dynamic portraits of women on the frontlines of resistance (Women of Suriname, Sweet Sugar Rage), and a one-of-a-kind diasporic musical revue (West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty), they blend agitprop and grassroots pedagogy with living folk traditions to forge a collective counter-cinema built around the fight for freedom.
Guest-curated by Jonathan Ali of Third Horizon Film Festival, who presented a version of this program entitled You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985 at THFF in 2025.
FEATURING: Haiti: The Way to Freedom (1973), The Terror and the Time (1978), Women of Suriname (1978), West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979), Bitter Cane (1983), Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us (1983), Sweet Sugar Rage (1985)
Conbody vs Everybody
Filmed over eight years, this five-part documentary series from director Debra Granik combines a remarkable, against-the-odds story of grit, survival, and redemption with an incisive look at the harms of America’s prison industrial complex. After years in and out of prison, former drug dealer turned entrepreneur Coss Marte is determined to take control of his future by building Conbody, a New York City gym with a unique social purpose: to employ formerly incarcerated people like himself in an attempt to combat the high rate of recidivism. As Marte wages an uphill battle against the stigma of incarceration and the realities of a relentlessly gentrifying city where second chances are hard to come by, what emerges is both an inspiring portrait of a man on a mission and a powerful examination of a system that continues to punish people even after they have served their time.
Exclusive Premieres
Magellan
Featuring a new introduction by director Lav Diaz, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers Series
A hypnotic journey engraved in images of staggering beauty and horror, this monumental achievement from acclaimed Filipino auteur Lav Diaz boldly rewrites the imperialist mythmaking of the Age of Discovery. Elegantly minimalist yet overpowering in its scale and impact, Magellan follows the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) as he embarks on his epochal quest to cross the Pacific—a voyage that spirals into zealotry and violence when he attempts to impose Christianity upon the people of the Philippines. Abetted by Bernal’s radically antiheroic portrayal, Diaz composes a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.
Lumière, le cinéma!
Featuring a new introduction by director Thierry Frémaux, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers Series
In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the surname of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institut Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, le cinéma! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious (re)telling of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.
REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS
The Spirit of ’45
Cinematic champion of working-class solidarity Ken Loach (I, Daniel Blake) looks back at the remarkable twentieth-century socialist surge that changed modern Britain forever. Through a vivid mix of interviews and archival footage, Loach brings to life the crucial postwar period that swept Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s insurgent Labour Party into power over Winston Churchill’s Conservative government, inaugurating a sweeping series of reforms—including the nationalization of railways, energy, housing, and health care—that marked the birth of the UK’s welfare state. Connecting the era’s hard-won populist triumphs with their present-day precarity, Loach offers both a stirring celebration of collective power and a sobering reminder of its fragility.
CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS
Él (Luis Buñuel, 1953)
Criterion Collection Edition #1289
A newlywed woman discovers that her husband’s charm masks disturbing depths of cruelty and madness in Luis Buñuel’s fascinatingly perverse tale of love gone wrong.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An appreciation by Guillermo del Toro, an interview with Buñuel by writer Jean-Claude Carrière, a video essay on Buñuel, and more.
Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942)
Criterion Collection Edition #867
Newlywed reporters find that love and careers clash in this razor-sharp screwball romance, the first of the iconic pairings between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director George Stevens, George Stevens Jr., and authors Marilyn Ann Moss and Claudia Roth Pierpont; and feature-length documentaries on Stevens and Tracy.
Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
Criterion Collection Edition #833
Terror lives in the suggestive shadows of this mood-drenched thriller about a woman haunted by a curse that turns her into a feline killer.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by film historian Gregory Mank, the documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, an interview with director Jacques Tourneur, and more.
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
Criterion Collection Edition #849
Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant play a recently divorced journalist couple brought back together in the newsroom in one of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director Howard Hawks and film scholar David Bordwell, featurettes about Hawks and Russell, a radio adaptation of the film, and more.
DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS
Directed by Kimi Takesue: Crossings and Encounters
The visually mesmerizing and deeply reflective films of Kimi Takesue traverse genres—including documentary, fiction, and experimental forms—to explore the charged spaces between observer and observed. Often centered on the act of travel, Takesue’s work follows tourists and locals as they navigate shared yet unequal terrain. In evocative shorts and acclaimed features like Where Are You Taking Me?, 95 and 6 to Go, and Onlookers, she turns an unblinking lens on cross-cultural encounters, revealing the subtle tensions, curiosities, and power dynamics that shape how we see and are seen across differences. Through her immersive long takes, Takesue invites audiences into moments of intimacy and unease that continually challenge our assumptions.
FEATURES: Where Are You Taking Me? (2010), 95 and 6 to Go (2016), Onlookers(2023)
SHORTS: Bound (1995), Rosewater (1999), Heaven’s Crossroad (2002), Summer of the Serpent (2004), E=NYC2 (2005), Suspended (2009), That Which Once Was (2011), Looking for Adventure (2013)
Three by the Ross Brothers
Flowing freely between documentary and performance, the richly impressionistic films of brothers Bill and Turner Ross are wonders of regional American filmmaking made according to an unwavering philosophy: to be completely present in the moment and alive to the ecstatic humanity that passes before their camera. Whether capturing the rhythms of life along the Texas-Mexico border (Western), the vibrant tradition of color guard (Contemporary Color), or the bleary-eyed last night in a Las Vegas dive bar (Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets), their films are vital records of a living, breathing Americana that approaches the mythic.
FEATURING: Western (2015), Contemporary Color (2016), Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020)
The Bill Douglas Trilogy
Composed in stark, black-and-white images of working-class poetry that have the elemental power of silent cinema, these three works by Bill Douglas are among the most miraculous achievements of British independent film. Based on Douglas’s own hardscrabble upbringing in a postwar Scottish mining village, the Trilogy traces the coming of age of a boy named Jamie (Stephen Archibald) as he contends with poverty, neglect, and emotional isolation before a life-changing friendship sets him on a new path. Tempering harsh reality with moments of tenderness and unexpected lyricism, Douglas crafts an indelible vision of a soul blossoming in the most unforgiving of circumstances.
FEATURING: My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), My Way Home (1978)
AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS
Clockwatchers
Four temp workers stuck in cubicle hell find their friendship tested by the pressures of the capitalist rat race in this brilliantly deadpan satire of corporate malaise.
ANIME
K-On! The Movie*
Five high school bandmates make music and memories on a life-changing trip to London in this charming, heartfelt ode to friendship and growing up.
HOLLYWOOD HITS
Queen Bee
Joan Crawford delivers a ferocious performance in this scorching domestic melodrama as a Southern socialite who rules her friends and family with an iron fist.
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA
An Unfinished Film
Reality and fiction blur to dizzying, emotionally gripping effect when a film crew reunites to finish a long-abandoned project—only to be locked down at the start of COVID-19.
Daughter’s Daughter
After a tragedy leaves her as the guardian of her late daughter’s frozen embryo, a woman must confront both her past and future in this elegantly emotional exploration of motherhood and regret.
Maya, Give Me a Title
The limitless imagination of cinematic dream-spinner Michel Gondry is unleashed in a series of lovingly handmade animated adventures inspired by his daughter’s prompts.
DOCUMENTARIES
The Shepherd and the Bear
The reintroduction of brown bears into a traditional shepherding community sparks conflict high amid the majestic French Pyrenees in an immersive, folkloric documentary.
Riotsville, U.S.A.*
Using training footage of Army-built model towns called “Riotsvilles,” this acclaimed documentary offers a poetic and furious reflection on the rebellions of the 1960s—and the machine that worked to destroy them.
Tokyo Trial
Assembled from over nine hundred reels of archival footage, this monumental documentary from the great Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri) examines the prosecution of Japanese war crimes and the fraught, often elusive pursuit of justice.
House of Cardin
This lively portrait chronicles the rise and global influence of visionary designer Pierre Cardin, whose space-age chic designs propelled fashion into the future.
NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS
Premiering May 1 in Stunts!: Point Break
An FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) goes undercover as a surfer to catch a band of bank-robbing wave-chasers in the most ecstatically adrenalized cult classic of the 1990s.
Premiering May 1 in Directed by Sean Baker: Four Letter Words
Sean Baker’s feature debut raises the bar for the indie hangout movie with an acerbic, hilarious portrait of young men unwilling to jettison the raucous immaturity of adolescence.