Criterion Announces April Releases
HomeCriterion Announces April Releases
Posted January 16, 2026 08:49 PM by Webmaster
The Criterion Collection has announced its April batch of releases. They are: Gilda (1946), Point Blank (1967), Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Resurrection (2025), Eclipse Series 48: Kinuyo Tanaka Directs (1953-1962), and John Singleton's Hood Trilogy (1991-2001).
Gilda 4K Blu-ray
Description: "Gilda, are you decent?" Rita Hayworth tosses her hair back and slyly responds, "Me?" in one of the great star entrances in movie history. Gilda, directed by Charles Vidor, features a sultry Hayworth in her most iconic role, as the much-lusted-after wife of a criminal kingpin (George Macready), as well as the former flame of his bitter henchman (Glenn Ford), and she drives them both mad with desire and jealousy. An ever-shifting battle of the sexes set on a Buenos Aires casino's glittering floor and in its shadowy back rooms, Gilda is among the most sensual of all Hollywood noirs.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Point Blank 4K Blu-ray
Director John Boorman brought the gangster drama into new realms of modernist abstraction with this stylized revenge thriller, which transforms hard-edged pulp into a kaleidoscopic psychological puzzle. Lee Marvin is iconically cool as the enigmatic Walker, who, after he's betrayed and left for dead by his best friend during a robbery, embarks on a brutal quest for vengeance, aided by a jaded ex-moll (a sensational Angie Dickinson) who has her own complex motives for helping him. Capturing Los Angeles locales with a surreal pop-art eye, Boorman locates the existential dread lurking beneath the city's sunlit surface.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Monty Python's Life of Brian 4K Blu-ray
The anarchic irreverence of British comedy legends Monty Python is at its most inspired in this brilliant send-up of the blockbuster biblical epic. In a stable in ancient Jerusalem, a child is born—a child who will grow up to be . . . Brian (Graham Chapman), an ordinary Judean who goes on to live an extraordinary life, becoming entangled in a plot to overthrow the Roman empire and being mistaken for the Messiah, among other unlikely events. Featuring ribald Roman puns, sharp political commentary, and an audacious crucifixion-themed musical number, the Pythons' most ambitious film is a hilarious satire of dogma and blind faith in which nothing is sacred.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Trouble in Paradise 4K Blu-ray
Ernst Lubitsch's famed touch is on exquisite display in this sexy pre-Code jewel, glittering with witty innuendo and elegant comic invention. It's love at first swindle when high-society thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) and pickpocket Lily Vautier (Miriam Hopkins) cross paths amid the canals of Venice while attempting to con each other—and then it's off to Paris, where the pair meet their match in their latest mark, the très chic Madame Colet (Kay Francis), whose fabulous fortune is exceeded only by her powers of seduction. With its delightfully risqué dialogue, swoonworthy couture, and high deco style, Trouble in Paradise is a pinnacle of comic-romantic sophistication that fizzes like the finest champagne. Special Features and Technical Specs:
Resurrection
With his ravishing third feature, visionary director Bi Gan takes his deepest plunge yet into the realm of pure dreamscape. In a world where humans have forsaken dreams in exchange for immortality, a dreaming monster (Jackson Yee) embarks on a shape-shifting odyssey through illusion, beauty, and terror that takes him across a century of cinema and to the end of time. Unfolding in five dazzlingly imagined chapters that encompass everything from silent-era expressionism to film noir to a delirious vampire love story shot in one of Bi's signature long takes, Resurrection is a work of breathtaking imagination in which cinema is the ultimate portal to the unconscious mind.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Eclipse Series 48: Kinuyo Tanaka Directs
Kinuyo Tanaka was already one of Japan's greatest actors—celebrated for her collaborations with auteurs such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Mikio Naruse—when she took a brave leap by embarking on a directing career in a studio system that actively discouraged female filmmakers. The six features she made over the course of a decade center on women characters who refuse to conform to restrictive roles as they seek independence. With compassion and insight, Tanaka critiques the social conditions and forces that shape her heroines' struggles: sex work and social shaming, the expectation of passively entering arranged marriages, taboos surrounding illness and the female body, imperialism, and religious persecution and forbidden love.
Love Letter
Released a year after the American occupation of Japan ended, Kinuyo Tanaka's directorial debut explores the professional and personal conflicts of Reikichi (Masayuki Mori), a repatriated veteran who searches for his lost love (Yoshiko Kuga) while translating romantic letters from Japanese women to American GIs. Adapted from a novel by Fumio Niwa, Love Letter depicts with incisive complexity Japanese soldiers struggling to adapt to a changed society, as well as the moral condemnation of Japanese women who became involved with the enemy.
The Moon Has Risen
For her second film, Kinuyo Tanaka directed a script by legendary filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, one of her mentors. Though informed by Ozu's singular take on familial relationships, The Moon Has Risen also possesses Tanaka's lively and elegant comic sensibility in its portrait of a widower (Chishu Ryu) who lives with his three daughters (Hisako Yamane, Yoko Sugi, and Mie Kitahara). Kitahara shines as the spirited youngest sister, whose matchmaking schemes force the family to confront—with amusing bewilderment—Japanese society's rapidly evolving mores.
Forever a Woman
Generally regarded as Kinuyo Tanaka's masterpiece, as well as her first personal film, Forever a Woman tells the story of a recent divorcée (Yumeji Tsukioka) who is diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. In adapting the real-life story of poet Fumiko Nakajo, Tanaka and screenwriter Sumie Tanaka (a longtime collaborator of Mikio Naruse's, though of no familial relation to Kinuyo) investigate issues of mortality, sexuality, and female independence with a frankness and audacity unprecedented in postwar Japanese cinema.
The Wandering Princess
Kinuyo Tanaka's first film in both color and CinemaScope is an epic about a woman caught in the torrents of history. Based on the memoirs of Hiro Saga, The Wandering Princess tells the story of Ryuko (Machiko Kyo), an aristocrat who, at the outset of World War II, enters an arranged marriage with Futetsu (Eiji Funakoshi), the younger brother of a soon-to-be-deposed monarch. With the story of Ryuko's enmeshment in the Japanese colonization of Manchuria, Tanaka realizes with startling depth her ambition to relate a historical saga from a critical female perspective.
Girls of the Night
With Girls of the Night, Kinuyo Tanaka reunited with screenwriter Sumie Tanaka to explore Japan's attempted reformation of former sex workers. The film follows Kuniko (Chisako Hara), who enters a rehabilitation center after the Prostitution Prevention Law prohibits her line of work. But creating a new life proves treacherous—wherever Kuniko goes, the past catches up with her. In once again taking on challenging subject matter, Kinuyo Tanaka paints an empathetic portrait of a fragile community of outcasts.
Love Under the Crucifix
Kinuyo Tanaka's final work as a director is a large-scale, sixteenth-century-set costume drama in the style of the golden age of Japanese cinema. Produced by the independent production company Ninjin Kurabu, Love Under the Crucifix centers on the forbidden romance between Ogin (Ineko Arima), daughter of a famous tea master, and Ukon (Tatsuya Nakadai), a married samurai. The ruling power's prohibition of Ukon's Christian faith forces the lovers to fight against the prejudices of an oppressive society while finding their way to mutual devotion.
STREET DATE: APRIL 28.
John Singleton's Hood Trilogy 4K Blu-ray
With his electrifying debut feature, Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton brought his South Central Los Angeles community to the screen with a bracing immediacy that rocked 1990s American cinema and popular culture. Poetic Justice and Baby Boy completed what the director considered his Hood Trilogy, a series of richly nuanced films that constitute a dramatic universe all their own. Featuring remarkable performances from supernova talents like Cuba Gooding Jr., Angela Bassett, Regina King, Janet Jackson, Tupac Shakur, and Taraji P. Henson, these indelible tales of urban life explore the experience of growing up Black and searching for one's place in the world.
Boyz n the Hood
One of the greatest debuts in American cinema, John Singleton's first feature is a harrowing and compassionate immersion into the lives of three Black teenage boys grappling with the uncertainty of their futures. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, the precocious Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the street-smart Doughboy (Ice Cube), and the athletically gifted Ricky (Morris Chestnut) navigate friendship, first love, the hopes and dreams of their families, and the realities of gang violence in a society where the odds are stacked against them. Nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the age of twenty-four, Singleton established himself as a vital new auteur already in breathtaking command of his craft.
Poetic Justice
Once upon a time in South Central LA . . . For his follow-up to Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton again turned the camera on his hometown to create a stirring exploration of grief, love, and creativity. Built around the electric chemistry between superstars Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur, the film follows two young Angelenos—Justice, a sensitive hairdresser and poet mourning the death of her boyfriend, and Lucky, a dashingly charismatic postal clerk—as they fall in love over the course of a liberating road trip. Featuring soul-nourishing poetry by Maya Angelou, and scene-stealing performances from Regina King and Joe Torry, Poetic Justice is one of the most irresistible romances of the 1990s.
Baby Boy
In this funny and fearlessly honest character study, John Singleton illuminates the pressures that Black men face as they make their way through early adulthood. Jody (Tyrese Gibson, in his feature-film debut) is a young native of South Central Los Angeles struggling to find direction in his life. At the same time, he tries to reconcile his volatile relationships with his loving but conflicted girlfriend (a revelatory Taraji P. Henson), who bears much of the burden of raising their son, and his strong-willed mother (AJ Johnson), whose imposing ex-con beau (Ving Rhames) is a thorn in Jody's side. Confronting complicated questions about sex, violence, and parent-child dynamics, the final installment in Singleton's Hood Trilogy showcases the deep humanism of a celebrated filmmaker working at the height of his powers.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Gilda 4K Blu-ray
Description: "Gilda, are you decent?" Rita Hayworth tosses her hair back and slyly responds, "Me?" in one of the great star entrances in movie history. Gilda, directed by Charles Vidor, features a sultry Hayworth in her most iconic role, as the much-lusted-after wife of a criminal kingpin (George Macready), as well as the former flame of his bitter henchman (Glenn Ford), and she drives them both mad with desire and jealousy. An ever-shifting battle of the sexes set on a Buenos Aires casino's glittering floor and in its shadowy back rooms, Gilda is among the most sensual of all Hollywood noirs.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW 4K RESTORATION OF THE FILM, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM
- Audio commentary by film critic Richard Schickel
- Interview with film-noir historian Eddie Muller
- Program featuring filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Baz Luhrmann discussing their appreciation for Gilda
- "The Odyssey of Rita Hayworth," a 1964 episode of the television show Hollywood and the Stars
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Plus: An essay by critic Sheila O'Malley
Point Blank 4K Blu-ray
Director John Boorman brought the gangster drama into new realms of modernist abstraction with this stylized revenge thriller, which transforms hard-edged pulp into a kaleidoscopic psychological puzzle. Lee Marvin is iconically cool as the enigmatic Walker, who, after he's betrayed and left for dead by his best friend during a robbery, embarks on a brutal quest for vengeance, aided by a jaded ex-moll (a sensational Angie Dickinson) who has her own complex motives for helping him. Capturing Los Angeles locales with a surreal pop-art eye, Boorman locates the existential dread lurking beneath the city's sunlit surface.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW 4K RESTORATION, supervised and approved by director John Boorman, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM
- Audio commentary featuring Boorman and filmmaker Steven Soderbergh
- Interview with Boorman conducted by author Geoff Dyer
- New interview with critic Mark Harris
- New reflections on the film by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch
- New program on the midcentury Los Angeles architecture featured in the film, with historian Alison Martino
- The Rock (1967), a short documentary on Alcatraz and the making of the film
- Interview with Marvin from a 1970 episode of The Dick Cavett Show
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by Dyer
Monty Python's Life of Brian 4K Blu-ray
The anarchic irreverence of British comedy legends Monty Python is at its most inspired in this brilliant send-up of the blockbuster biblical epic. In a stable in ancient Jerusalem, a child is born—a child who will grow up to be . . . Brian (Graham Chapman), an ordinary Judean who goes on to live an extraordinary life, becoming entangled in a plot to overthrow the Roman empire and being mistaken for the Messiah, among other unlikely events. Featuring ribald Roman puns, sharp political commentary, and an audacious crucifixion-themed musical number, the Pythons' most ambitious film is a hilarious satire of dogma and blind faith in which nothing is sacred.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW 4K RESTORATION, supervised by Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM
- Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Two audio commentaries featuring Pythons Gilliam, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin
- The Story of Brian (2007), a making-of documentary
- The Pythons (1979), a documentary about Monty Python filmed on location for Life of Brian
- Behind-the-scenes Super 8 film shot by Palin
- Five deleted scenes with commentary by the Pythons
- Original British radio ads starring Mrs. Cleese, Mrs. Gilliam, Mrs. Idle, and Palin's dentist
- Original illustrated recording by the Pythons of an early version of their screenplay
- Animated stills gallery
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Bilge Ebiri
Trouble in Paradise 4K Blu-ray
Ernst Lubitsch's famed touch is on exquisite display in this sexy pre-Code jewel, glittering with witty innuendo and elegant comic invention. It's love at first swindle when high-society thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) and pickpocket Lily Vautier (Miriam Hopkins) cross paths amid the canals of Venice while attempting to con each other—and then it's off to Paris, where the pair meet their match in their latest mark, the très chic Madame Colet (Kay Francis), whose fabulous fortune is exceeded only by her powers of seduction. With its delightfully risqué dialogue, swoonworthy couture, and high deco style, Trouble in Paradise is a pinnacle of comic-romantic sophistication that fizzes like the finest champagne. Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW4K RESTORATION, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation
- Audio commentary featuring Scott Eyman, biographer of director Ernst Lubitsch
- Introduction by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
- New video essay by critic David Cairns
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme
Resurrection
With his ravishing third feature, visionary director Bi Gan takes his deepest plunge yet into the realm of pure dreamscape. In a world where humans have forsaken dreams in exchange for immortality, a dreaming monster (Jackson Yee) embarks on a shape-shifting odyssey through illusion, beauty, and terror that takes him across a century of cinema and to the end of time. Unfolding in five dazzlingly imagined chapters that encompass everything from silent-era expressionism to film noir to a delirious vampire love story shot in one of Bi's signature long takes, Resurrection is a work of breathtaking imagination in which cinema is the ultimate portal to the unconscious mind.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- Meet the Filmmakers: Bi Gan, a Criterion Channel original interview
- Trailer
- Notes by film critic Siddhant Adlakha
Eclipse Series 48: Kinuyo Tanaka Directs
Kinuyo Tanaka was already one of Japan's greatest actors—celebrated for her collaborations with auteurs such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Mikio Naruse—when she took a brave leap by embarking on a directing career in a studio system that actively discouraged female filmmakers. The six features she made over the course of a decade center on women characters who refuse to conform to restrictive roles as they seek independence. With compassion and insight, Tanaka critiques the social conditions and forces that shape her heroines' struggles: sex work and social shaming, the expectation of passively entering arranged marriages, taboos surrounding illness and the female body, imperialism, and religious persecution and forbidden love.
Love Letter
Released a year after the American occupation of Japan ended, Kinuyo Tanaka's directorial debut explores the professional and personal conflicts of Reikichi (Masayuki Mori), a repatriated veteran who searches for his lost love (Yoshiko Kuga) while translating romantic letters from Japanese women to American GIs. Adapted from a novel by Fumio Niwa, Love Letter depicts with incisive complexity Japanese soldiers struggling to adapt to a changed society, as well as the moral condemnation of Japanese women who became involved with the enemy.
The Moon Has Risen
For her second film, Kinuyo Tanaka directed a script by legendary filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, one of her mentors. Though informed by Ozu's singular take on familial relationships, The Moon Has Risen also possesses Tanaka's lively and elegant comic sensibility in its portrait of a widower (Chishu Ryu) who lives with his three daughters (Hisako Yamane, Yoko Sugi, and Mie Kitahara). Kitahara shines as the spirited youngest sister, whose matchmaking schemes force the family to confront—with amusing bewilderment—Japanese society's rapidly evolving mores.
Forever a Woman
Generally regarded as Kinuyo Tanaka's masterpiece, as well as her first personal film, Forever a Woman tells the story of a recent divorcée (Yumeji Tsukioka) who is diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. In adapting the real-life story of poet Fumiko Nakajo, Tanaka and screenwriter Sumie Tanaka (a longtime collaborator of Mikio Naruse's, though of no familial relation to Kinuyo) investigate issues of mortality, sexuality, and female independence with a frankness and audacity unprecedented in postwar Japanese cinema.
The Wandering Princess
Kinuyo Tanaka's first film in both color and CinemaScope is an epic about a woman caught in the torrents of history. Based on the memoirs of Hiro Saga, The Wandering Princess tells the story of Ryuko (Machiko Kyo), an aristocrat who, at the outset of World War II, enters an arranged marriage with Futetsu (Eiji Funakoshi), the younger brother of a soon-to-be-deposed monarch. With the story of Ryuko's enmeshment in the Japanese colonization of Manchuria, Tanaka realizes with startling depth her ambition to relate a historical saga from a critical female perspective.
Girls of the Night
With Girls of the Night, Kinuyo Tanaka reunited with screenwriter Sumie Tanaka to explore Japan's attempted reformation of former sex workers. The film follows Kuniko (Chisako Hara), who enters a rehabilitation center after the Prostitution Prevention Law prohibits her line of work. But creating a new life proves treacherous—wherever Kuniko goes, the past catches up with her. In once again taking on challenging subject matter, Kinuyo Tanaka paints an empathetic portrait of a fragile community of outcasts.
Love Under the Crucifix
Kinuyo Tanaka's final work as a director is a large-scale, sixteenth-century-set costume drama in the style of the golden age of Japanese cinema. Produced by the independent production company Ninjin Kurabu, Love Under the Crucifix centers on the forbidden romance between Ogin (Ineko Arima), daughter of a famous tea master, and Ukon (Tatsuya Nakadai), a married samurai. The ruling power's prohibition of Ukon's Christian faith forces the lovers to fight against the prejudices of an oppressive society while finding their way to mutual devotion.
STREET DATE: APRIL 28.
John Singleton's Hood Trilogy 4K Blu-ray
With his electrifying debut feature, Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton brought his South Central Los Angeles community to the screen with a bracing immediacy that rocked 1990s American cinema and popular culture. Poetic Justice and Baby Boy completed what the director considered his Hood Trilogy, a series of richly nuanced films that constitute a dramatic universe all their own. Featuring remarkable performances from supernova talents like Cuba Gooding Jr., Angela Bassett, Regina King, Janet Jackson, Tupac Shakur, and Taraji P. Henson, these indelible tales of urban life explore the experience of growing up Black and searching for one's place in the world.
Boyz n the Hood
One of the greatest debuts in American cinema, John Singleton's first feature is a harrowing and compassionate immersion into the lives of three Black teenage boys grappling with the uncertainty of their futures. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, the precocious Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the street-smart Doughboy (Ice Cube), and the athletically gifted Ricky (Morris Chestnut) navigate friendship, first love, the hopes and dreams of their families, and the realities of gang violence in a society where the odds are stacked against them. Nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the age of twenty-four, Singleton established himself as a vital new auteur already in breathtaking command of his craft.
Poetic Justice
Once upon a time in South Central LA . . . For his follow-up to Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton again turned the camera on his hometown to create a stirring exploration of grief, love, and creativity. Built around the electric chemistry between superstars Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur, the film follows two young Angelenos—Justice, a sensitive hairdresser and poet mourning the death of her boyfriend, and Lucky, a dashingly charismatic postal clerk—as they fall in love over the course of a liberating road trip. Featuring soul-nourishing poetry by Maya Angelou, and scene-stealing performances from Regina King and Joe Torry, Poetic Justice is one of the most irresistible romances of the 1990s.
Baby Boy
In this funny and fearlessly honest character study, John Singleton illuminates the pressures that Black men face as they make their way through early adulthood. Jody (Tyrese Gibson, in his feature-film debut) is a young native of South Central Los Angeles struggling to find direction in his life. At the same time, he tries to reconcile his volatile relationships with his loving but conflicted girlfriend (a revelatory Taraji P. Henson), who bears much of the burden of raising their son, and his strong-willed mother (AJ Johnson), whose imposing ex-con beau (Ving Rhames) is a thorn in Jody's side. Confronting complicated questions about sex, violence, and parent-child dynamics, the final installment in Singleton's Hood Trilogy showcases the deep humanism of a celebrated filmmaker working at the height of his powers.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- 4K RESTORATION of Boyz n the Hood, supervised and approved by director John Singleton, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack and alternate Dolby Atmos soundtrack
- 4K RESTORAITONS of Poetic Justice (with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack) and Baby Boy (with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack)
- DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATIONS OF ALL THREE FILMS
- Audio commentaries on all three films featuring Singleton
- New conversation between filmmakers Ryan Coogler and Regina King
- New documentary on Singleton's filmmaking process featuring publicist Cassandra Butcher, casting director Kimberly Hardin, and collaborator Paul Hall
- New audio interviews with actors Taraji P. Henson and Tyrese Gibson
- Archival interviews with cast and crew
- Press conference from 1991
- Deleted scenes, audition footage, music videos, and trailers
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Julian Kimble
