The Criterion Collection has announced its October batch of releases. They are:
Christiane F. (1981),
Frankenstein (2025),
The Shout (1978),
Welcome to the Thunderdome (1995),
The Silence of the Lambs (1991),
Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller (1949-1951), and
The Complete Kubrick (1952-1999).
Christiane F. 4K Blu-ray
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.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW 4K RESTORATION, approved by director Uli Edel, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- 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
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 20.
Christiane F.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW 4K RESTORATION, approved by director Uli Edel, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- 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
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 20.
Frankenstein 4K Blu-ray
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.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- 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 Blu-ray 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
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 27.
Frankenstein
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- 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
- 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
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 27.
The Shout
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.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- 2K 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
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 13.
Welcome II the Terrordome
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.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW 2K 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
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 6.
The Silence of the Lambs 4K Blu-ray
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.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- 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 Blu-ray 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
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 20.
Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller
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.
I Shot Jesse James
After years of crime reporting, screenwriting, and authoring pulp novels, Samuel Fuller made his directorial debut with the lonesome ballad of Robert Ford (played by Red River's John Ireland), who fatally betrayed his notorious friend Jesse James. At once modest and intense, I Shot Jesse James is an engrossing pocket portrait of guilt and psychological torment, and an auspicious beginning for the maverick filmmaker.
The Baron of Arizona
In one of his own favorite roles, Vincent Price portrays legendary swindler James Addison Reavis, who in 1880 concocted an elaborate and dangerous hoax to name himself the "Baron" of Arizona, and therefore inherit all the land in the state. Samuel Fuller adapts this tall tale to film with fleet, elegant storytelling and a sly sense of humor.
The Steel Helmet
The Steel Helmet marked Samuel Fuller's official arrival as a mighty cinematic force. Despite its relatively low budget, this portrait of Korean War soldiers dealing with moral and racial identity crises remains one of the director's most gripping, realistic depictions of the blood and guts of war, as well as a reflection of Fuller's irreducible social conscience. So controversial were the film's comments on domestic and war crimes (American bigotry, the Japanese American World War II internment camps) that Fuller became the target of an FBI investigation.
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 13.
The Complete Kubrick
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.
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 20.