Here’s What’s Coming to The Criterion Channel in April 2025

The Criterion Channel has announced the titles arriving on their streaming platform in April 2025. Included are new collections featuring the films of Penélope Cruz, David Cronenberg, Jacques Rivette, plus the Criterion Collection Editions of Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother and David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.

Not yet announced, but still possible to premiere in April, is the Italian Best International Feature entry VERMIGLIO. We’ll post with any news of a launch date.

Here’s the full breakdown:

Fun City: NYC Woos Hollywood, Flirts with Disaster

In the late ’60s and ’70s, New York City under Mayor John V. Lindsay was a turbulent yet vibrant cinematic landscape. With the city sliding toward bankruptcy and social collapse, the Mayor’s Office of Film was established in 1966 to help foster the local film industry, providing financial support to on-location productions in order to infuse the city with jobs and morale. Somewhat ironically, the films that resulted—from defining works of the New Hollywood like The Panic in Needle Park and Dog Day Afternoon to blaxploitation favorites like Cotton Comes to Harlem and Across 110th Street—formed a raw and often surreal portrait of a city in crisis, an urban powder keg roiling with social unrest and unpredictable danger. Capturing both the city’s dysfunction and its inescapable energy, this era of filmmaking is now the stuff of legend: a key cinematic moment that would forever shape the identity of New York.

Curated by J. Hoberman, author of the forthcoming book Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop (Verso)

FEATURING: You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), Bye Bye Braverman (1968), Coogan’s Bluff (1968)*, Madigan (1968)*, Rosemary’s Baby (1968)*, The Plot Against Harry(1969), The Angel Levine (1970), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Norman Mailer vs. Fun City (1970), Bananas (1971), Born to Win (1971), Little Murders (1971), The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Across 110th Street (1972), Black Caesar(1973), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Starring Penélope Cruz

A magnetic screen presence who brings passionate intensity and fearless emotional depth to her numerous acclaimed performances, Penélope Cruz has been a major force in both Spanish and American cinema for more than three decades. In this, her birthday month of April, we revisit a selection of career highlights, from her breakout roles in Spanish hits Jamón jamón and Open Your Eyes to her internationally renowned collaborations with director Pedro Almodóvar All About My Mother and Volver and her Hollywood star turns in Vanilla Sky and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

FEATURING: Belle Époque (1992)*, Jamón jamón (1992), Open Your Eyes (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Vanilla Sky (2001)*, Volver (2006)*, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Nine (2009)*

Legacies of War: Vietnam Across the Divides

On the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, filmmaker and program curator Tony Bui presents a multiperspective look at the Vietnam War on film, moving beyond conventional narratives to include voices and viewpoints often overlooked in mainstream cinema. While the most famous Vietnam War films—like the cultural touchstones Platoon and Full Metal Jacket—focus on the experience of American soldiers, this selection paints a broader, more complex picture, exploring Vietnamese perspectives, the war’s impact on civilians, and postwar reckoning. Encompassing powerfully human Vietnamese dramas like The Little Girl of Hanoi and When the Tenth Month Comes, wrenching documentaries like Regret to Inform and Hearts and Minds, and Bui’s own poetic reflection on Vietnam past and present, Three Seasons, these stories of loss, resilience, trauma, and reconciliation offer new ways of understanding a conflict that shattered and shaped countless lives.

FEATURING: On the Same River (1959), Ms. Tư Hậu (1963), Hearts and Minds(1974), The Little Girl of Hanoi (1974), When the Tenth Month Comes (1984), Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Casualties of War (1989), In Country (1989), Regret to Inform (1998), Three Seasons (1999)*, The Fog of War(2003)*, Journey from the Fall (2007)

Directed by Jacques Rivette

One of the most innovative and enigmatic directors of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette approached filmmaking as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure of the imagination, crafting sprawling, immersive works that unfold as labyrinths, games, and puzzles to be deciphered. Blurring the boundaries between narrative and improvisation, fiction and reality, his films invite audiences to witness not just a story, but the very process of storytelling itself. Whether turning the streets of Paris into a playground in open-air fantasias like Céline and Julie Go Boating and Le Pont du Nord or exploring mysterious interior states in mesmerizing dramas like L’amour fou and La belle noiseuse, Rivette evokes a world both grounded and dreamlike, where every visual choice seems to unlock a door to deeper layers of meaning.

FEATURING: Le coup du berger (1956), Paris Belongs to Us (1961), L’amour fou(1969), Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), Le Pont du Nord (1981), Love on the Ground (1984), The Gang of Four (1989), La belle noiseuse (1991), Joan the Maid (1994), Up, Down, Fragile (1995), Va savoir (2001)*

Chinese Crime Thrillers

Noir was never part of mainland China’s literary or cinematic lexicon until relatively recently, when a new wave of gripping, boldly stylized thrillers took up the genre’s conventions—gritty narratives, morally complex characters, and pervasive disillusionment—as a lens for potent social commentary. These moody, subversive tales of crime, corruption, and survival in a rapidly changing world explore issues of economic disparity and the fragility of justice as well as larger existential questions of identity, purpose, and the struggle for individual agency. Delving into the darkest corners of contemporary China, acclaimed films like Black Coal, Thin Ice; Ash Is Purest White; Dying to Survive; and Streetwisebrilliantly use the trappings of genre cinema to explore new social and psychological territory.

FEATURING: Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014), Chongqing Hot Pot (2016), Ash Is Purest White (2018), Dying to Survive (2018), The Wild Goose Lake (2019), Streetwise (2021), The Fallen Bridge (2022), Only the River Flows (2023)

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Naked Acts

A long-unseen jewel of 1990s Black independent filmmaking, Bridgett M. Davis’s fearless exploration of Black female agency centers on Cicely (Jake-Ann Jones), the daughter of a former blaxploitation star, whose own foray into acting hits a snag when her role in a low-budget indie film requires her to do a nude scene—forcing her to confront her deep-seated body-image issues, the trauma of sexual assault, and her troubled relationship with her mother. Deftly blending raw drama with whip-smart comedy, Naked Acts touches on thorny issues of bodily autonomy and self-realization with a freshness and incisiveness that mark Davis as a pioneer in telling African American women’s stories on-screen with authenticity and insight.

*Three Seasons**

The first American feature to be filmed in Vietnam in the aftermath of the war, Tony Bui’s gorgeous, richly textured portrait of everyday life in a rapidly changing, increasingly westernized Ho Chi Minh City follows the intersecting struggles, hopes, and dreams of a collection of ordinary people, including a young flower seller (Nguyễn Ngọc Hiệp) who forms a bond with an ailing poet; a rickshaw driver (Đơn Dương) who falls in love with a troubled sex worker; and an American former marine (Harvey Keitel) who fought in the war and has now returned to Vietnam to find the child he fathered years before. Winner of both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, the sublimely photographed Three Seasons captures aching moments of human connection in a city suspended between tradition and modernity.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980)

Criterion Collection Edition #26

A combustible performance from Bob Hoskins is the fuse that lights this heart-stopping underworld saga, a landmark of British crime cinema with a kick of Cockney grit.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director John Mackenzie; a documentary about the making of the film featuring interviews with Mackenzie, Hoskins, and actor Helen Mirren; an introduction by Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark; and more.

Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Criterion Collection Edition #21

Jeremy Irons gives a tour-de-force double performance as a pair of twin gynecologists who descend into a into a whirlpool of sexual confusion, drugs, and madness.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director David Cronenberg, Irons, and other crew members; a behind-the-scenes featurette; and more

All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Criterion Collection Edition #1012

In Pedro Almodóvar’s beloved, Oscar-winning melodrama, a grief-stricken single mother sets out to find the father of her son and discovers a surprising new surrogate family in Barcelona.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A documentary on the making of the film; a television program featuring Almodóvar, his mother, and members of the cast; and more.

Céline and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)

Criterion Collection Edition #1069

A daydreaming librarian (Dominique Labourier) meets an enigmatic magician (Juliet Berto) and together they become the heroines of a mind-warping adventure in one of the most enchantingly inventive films of the French New Wave.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by critic Adrian Martin, a documentary on director Jacques Rivette by filmmaker Claire Denis, interviews with cast and crew members, and more

CRITERION ORIGINALS

Spotlight on Kinuyo Tanaka with Imogen Sara Smith

Kinuyo Tanaka was already one of Japan’s greatest actors when she took an unprecedented risk by embarking on a directing career. In the latest installment of Criterion’s Spotlight series, critic Imogen Sara Smith explores the six extraordinary features that Tanaka directed, centered on women characters seeking independence and individual agency.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Directed by David Cronenberg

Gooey, splattery, fleshy nightmares of contagion and transformation, the audacious cinematic transgressions of David Cronenberg—whose latest film, The Shrouds, infects theaters this April—are not so much watched as experienced in a visceral, full-body wave of can’t-look-away revulsion and fascination. These definitive body-horror classics—including the killer-kiddo shocker The Brood, his head-exploding commercial breakthrough Scanners, and the doubly diabolical psychological puzzle Dead Ringers—suggest that perhaps nothing is more terrifying than our own selves.

FEATURING: Stereo (1969), Crimes of the Future (1970), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Fast Company (1979), Scanners (1981), Dead Ringers (1988)

Three Noirs by John Farrow

Prolific, Australian-born director John Farrow was one of studio-era Hollywood’s great unsung craftsmen, consistently elevating what could have been routine, B-budget genre fare through stylish visuals and a vivid feeling for place and character. It was in the realm of noir that he made his greatest mark, bringing a surfeit of ominous atmosphere to this trio of taut crime thrillers—the twisty corporate-suspense classic The Big Clock, the creepily fatalistic Cornell Woolrich adaptation Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and the eccentric noir take on the Faust legend Alias Nick Beal—featuring memorably sinister performances from Charles Laughton, Ray Milland, and Edward G. Robinson.

FEATURING: The Big Clock (1948)*, Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)*, Alias Nick Beal (1949)*

Three Melodramas by Ray Yeung

Specializing in tender, sensitive explorations of queer and Asian identity, writer-director Ray Yeung has carved out a unique place in contemporary Hong Kong cinema to tell intimate stories of gay love finding a way in the face of repression and prejudice. Shot in New York City, Front Cover is a sweetly endearing romantic comedy with a queer culture-clash twist, while Twilight’s Kiss and All Shall Be Well, both set in Hong Kong, are something altogether rare in cinema: nuanced and deeply affecting portraits of older gay and lesbian couples navigating love and loss in later life.

FEATURING: Front Cover (2015), Twilight’s Kiss (2019), All Shall Be Well (2024)

SHORT FILMS

Prismatic Ground Presents

One of the most exciting and adventurous film festivals to emerge in recent years, Prismatic Ground brings together aesthetically innovative, politically radical work at the intersection of experimental and documentary cinema. This selection of shorts from the festival’s first four editions offers an eclectic cross section of vital works by filmmakers whose approach to image-making eschews traditional narrative in favor of abstraction and sensation, showing how avant-garde techniques can be deployed to illuminate profound personal experiences as well as violent histories of colonialism, oppression, and dispossession. The latest additions from the festival’s 2024 edition confront topics as varied as community, resistance, family, landscape, history, myth, and memory with rigorous attention to form and galvanizing emotional power. The fifth edition of Prismatic Ground runs from April 30–May 4, 2025.

NEWLY ADDED SHORTS: Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction (1984), 121280 Ritual (2008), Landscape Suspended (2022), Hinkelten (2023), A Radical Duet(2023), at the bamboo green (2024), Before Seriana (2024), On the Battlefield (2024), ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong (2024), A Stone’s Throw (2024)

Burnt Milk

An intoxicating head rush of ecstatic, stream-of-consciousness imagery evokes an elderly Jamaican immigrant’s sense memories of home in Joseph Douglas Elmhirst’s poetic short.

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Showgirls

Paul Verhoeven’s delirious star-is-born satire goes farther than any other film of the 1990s in its orgiastic depiction of consumerism, crass spectacle, and the dark side of the American dream.

TRUE STORIES

Resynator

In unearthing the revolutionary synthesizer her late father invented in the 1970s, director Alison Tavel not only revives his mission to share it with the world, she unexpectedly forges a deep bond with the parent she never got the chance to know.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

Art College 1994

The hand-drawn animation of Liu Jian’s charmingly wistful slice-of-life gem vividly evokes the idle, idealistic world of China’s 1990s slacker youth in the precious days before adult responsibility.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Premiering April 1 in Directed by Joyce Chopra: Replacing Dad

Director Joyce Chopra (Smooth Talk) brings remarkable sensitivity to this made-for-television look at a woman in the process of rebuilding her shattered home.