Criterion Announces January Releases
HomeCriterion Announces January Releases
Posted October 16, 2026 06:12 PM by Webmaster
The Criterion Collection has announced its January batch of releases. They are: Deliverance (1972), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Career Girls (1997), Chocolat (1988), Parasite (2019), and Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, No. 6 (1965-1988).
Deliverance 4K Blu-ray
Description: The ultimate odyssey into the untamed wilderness of the supposedly civilized heart, John Boorman's shock to the pop-culture consciousness follows four friends from Atlanta—played by Burt Reynolds (in his breakthrough role), Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox—on a weekend canoeing trip in rural Georgia. What they encounter there—startling, brutal, and unforgettable—has unsettled viewers for more than fifty years. Shooting on location in Appalachia to achieve scenes of almost mythic resonance (including the iconic dueling-banjos sequence), Boorman constructs one of the most harrowing survival thrillers ever made and a potent, daringly ambiguous deconstruction of masculinity on the edge.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Deliverance
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Midnight Cowboy 4K Blu-ray
Description: One of the British New Wave's most versatile directors, John Schlesinger came to New York in the late 1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy city women; he finds a companion in Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida, played by Dustin Hoffman in a radical departure from his breakthrough in The Graduate. A critical and commercial success despite controversy over what the MPAA termed its "homosexual frame of reference," Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the Best Picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Career Girls
Description: The inimitable filmmaker Mike Leigh's affection for spirited, irrepressible figures whom society too often overlooks shines through every frame of this wonderfully tender, bittersweet ode to female friendship and hard-won inner growth. Born out of the singularly collaborative, improvisational rehearsal methods that give Leigh's characters their multidimensional richness and unforgettable spark, Career Girls features vividly idiosyncratic performances from Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman as former roommates who reunite in London six years after striking out on their own. Over the course of a weekend full of laughter, tears, memories, and chance encounters, they confront what it means to revisit the past—in the form of both wounds that haven't fully healed and bonds that can never be broken.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Chocolat
Description: Claire Denis immediately revealed her command of cinematic form with her debut feature, drawn from her own experience of growing up in French colonial Africa. After many years of living in France, a white woman (Mireille Perrier) returns to the town in Cameroon where she spent her childhood. There, she reflects on her past, including her relationship with Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), a Black servant with whom she formed a friendship while not fully grasping the divides that governed their worlds. Already displaying many of Denis's artistic signatures—including an immersive sense of place; an elliptical approach to storytelling; and an interest in complex dynamics of race, sex, and power—Chocolat is an evocatively impressionistic yet piercingly precise examination of the psychology of colonialism.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Parasite 4K Blu-ray
Description: A zeitgeist-defining sensation that distilled a global reckoning over class inequality into a tour de force of pop-cinema subversion, Bong Joon Ho's genre-scrambling black-comic thriller confirms his status as one of the world's foremost filmmakers. Two families in Seoul—one barely scraping by in a dank semibasement in a low-lying neighborhood, the other living in luxury in a modern architectural marvel overlooking the city—become entwined in a dangerous relationship that will lay bare the dark contradictions of capitalism with shocking ferocity. A bravura showcase for its director's meticulously constructed set pieces, bolstered by a brilliant ensemble cast and stunning production design, Parasite cemented the New Korean Cinema as an undeniable international force when it swept almost every major prize from the Cannes Film Festival to the Academy Awards, where it made history as the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, No. 6
Description: Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project has maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of more than seventy restorations of works by essential filmmakers. This collector's set gathers four arresting and stylistically distinctive films, ranging from the politically charged to the mythical and dreamlike, from Guinea-Bissau (Mortu nega), Brazil (São Paulo, Incorporated), Côte d'Ivoire (The Woman with the Knife), and Iran (The Stranger and the Fog). Each title is a significant contribution to the art form and a window onto a cinematic tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.
Mortu nega
A soulful, bottom-up portrait of a country finding its postcolonial identity, Mortu nega follows the determined Diminga (Bia Gomes) as she journeys to the front lines in search of her soldier husband during the final days of Guinea-Bissau's war for liberation from Portugal. After freedom is won, Diminga and her compatriots must maintain a steely resolve in the face of a host of daily challenges: accessing health care, navigating the state bureaucracy, and confronting a devastating drought. Directed with fierce commitment by Flora Gomes, a student of anticolonial leader Amílcar Cabral's, Mortu nega offers a clarion call for strength and healing through unity.
Mortu nega was restored in 2025 by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Flora Gomes. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers, and UNESCO, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Arsenal–Institut für Film und Videokunst.
São Paulo, Incorporated
Writer-director Luiz Sérgio Person's debut feature is a masterly vision of existential unrest in Saõ Paulo amid the mass industrialization of the 1960s. This bracingly modernist, puzzlelike film follows Carlos (Walmor Chagas), a middle-class auto-industry employee, as he questions his relationships with romantic partners past and present (played by Darlene Glória, Ana Esmeralda, and Eva Wilma), as well as his participation in the transforming economy. A kind of city symphony filled with striking, dynamic images of a rapidly changing urban landscape, São Paulo, Incorporated is a cry of rebellion against a suffocating push to modernize, and one of the landmark works of Brazilian cinema.
São Paulo, Incorporated was restored in 2025 by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata, Cinemateca Brasileira, and JLS Facilidades Sonoras–Estúdio JLS, in association with Cinemateca Brasileira, Lauper Films Ltda, and the family of Luiz Sérgio Person. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to the Italian Institute of Culture in São Paulo.
The Woman with the Knife
Equal parts symbolist psychodrama and shamanic ghost story, The Woman with the Knife delivers a surreal investigation of fractured identity. The sole feature by trailblazing Ivorian filmmaker Timité Bassori stars the writer-director himself as a bourgeois intellectual whose life is thrown into turmoil after he experiences a disturbing vision of a mysterious, knife-wielding woman—the beginning of a crisis that forces him to confront his deep-seated sexual repression and social alienation. Capturing the streetscapes of 1960s Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, in New Wave–cool black and white, and set to a dreamy mix of American jazz and West African pop, this touchstone work of African cinema is a daring and complex journey into the postcolonial unconscious.
The Woman with the Knife was restored in 2019 by the Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, at L'Immagine Ritrovata. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers, and UNESCO, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
The Stranger and the Fog
Forged in rhythm, ritual, and mysticism, this masterwork by Iranian New Wave legend Bahram Beyzaie is a transfixing allegory shot through with the fear of a mysterious, encroaching force. When a boat carrying a severely wounded man (Khosrow Shojazadeh) drifts onto the shore of a small coastal village, most of the community regards him with suspicion. But the quietly confident Rana (Parvaneh Massoumi), whose husband disappeared a year ago at sea, finds herself drawn to the outsider. The Stranger and the Fog, which was banned in Iran following the 1979 revolution, is a film of overwhelming power, possessing both the epic dimensions of myth and the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream.
The Stranger and the Fog was restored in 2023 by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Bahram Beyzaie. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Ehsan Khoshbakht and Mojdeh Shamsaie.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Deliverance 4K Blu-ray
Description: The ultimate odyssey into the untamed wilderness of the supposedly civilized heart, John Boorman's shock to the pop-culture consciousness follows four friends from Atlanta—played by Burt Reynolds (in his breakthrough role), Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox—on a weekend canoeing trip in rural Georgia. What they encounter there—startling, brutal, and unforgettable—has unsettled viewers for more than fifty years. Shooting on location in Appalachia to achieve scenes of almost mythic resonance (including the iconic dueling-banjos sequence), Boorman constructs one of the most harrowing survival thrillers ever made and a potent, daringly ambiguous deconstruction of masculinity on the edge.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- TWO-DISC (4K BLU-RAY/BLU-RAY) COMBO PACK RELEASE
- NEW 4K RESTORATION, supervised and approved by director John Boorman, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM
- Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Audio commentary featuring Boorman
- New interview with critic Mark Harris
- Audio reading of "Mountain Men: An Oral History of Deliverance," a 2011 article by Charles Bethea
- James Dickey reading from his novel Deliverance
- The Dangerous World of "Deliverance," a 1972 documentary about the making of the film
- Interview with Dickey from a 1977 episode of The Dick Cavett Show
- The Making of "Deliverance" (2007), a four-part documentary by Laurent Bouzereau
- The Cast Looks Back, a roundtable discussion from 2012
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author Francine Prose
Deliverance
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW 4K RESTORATION, supervised and approved by director John Boorman, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Audio commentary featuring Boorman
- New interview with critic Mark Harris
- Audio reading of "Mountain Men: An Oral History of Deliverance," a 2011 article by Charles Bethea
- James Dickey reading from his novel Deliverance
- The Dangerous World of "Deliverance," a 1972 documentary about the making of the film
- Interview with Dickey from a 1977 episode of The Dick Cavett Show
- The Making of "Deliverance" (2007), a four-part documentary by Laurent Bouzereau
- The Cast Looks Back, a roundtable discussion from 2012
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author Francine Prose
Midnight Cowboy 4K Blu-ray
Description: One of the British New Wave's most versatile directors, John Schlesinger came to New York in the late 1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy city women; he finds a companion in Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida, played by Dustin Hoffman in a radical departure from his breakthrough in The Graduate. A critical and commercial success despite controversy over what the MPAA termed its "homosexual frame of reference," Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the Best Picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- TWO-DISC (4K BLU-RAY/BLU-RAY) COMBO PACK RELEASE
- 4K RESTORATION supervised and approved by cinematographer Adam Holender, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM
- Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Audio commentary from 1991 featuring director John Schlesinger and producer Jerome Hellman
- Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of "Midnight Cowboy" (2022), a documentary by Nancy Buirski
- Video essay with commentary by Holender
- Photo gallery with commentary by photographer Michael Childers
- The Crowd Around the Cowboy, a 1969 short film made on location for Midnight Cowboy
- Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey (1990), a documentary by Eugene Corr and Robert Hillmann
- Two short documentaries on the making and release of the film
- Interview from 1970 with actor Jon Voight on The David Frost Show
- Voight's original screen test
- Interview from 2000 with Schlesinger for BAFTA Los Angeles
- Excerpts from the 2002 BAFTA Los Angeles tribute to Schlesinger
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Harris
Career Girls
Description: The inimitable filmmaker Mike Leigh's affection for spirited, irrepressible figures whom society too often overlooks shines through every frame of this wonderfully tender, bittersweet ode to female friendship and hard-won inner growth. Born out of the singularly collaborative, improvisational rehearsal methods that give Leigh's characters their multidimensional richness and unforgettable spark, Career Girls features vividly idiosyncratic performances from Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman as former roommates who reunite in London six years after striking out on their own. Over the course of a weekend full of laughter, tears, memories, and chance encounters, they confront what it means to revisit the past—in the form of both wounds that haven't fully healed and bonds that can never be broken.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW 4K RESTORATION, supervised and approved by director Mike Leigh, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack
- Selected-scene commentary by Leigh
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Jessica Kiang
Chocolat
Description: Claire Denis immediately revealed her command of cinematic form with her debut feature, drawn from her own experience of growing up in French colonial Africa. After many years of living in France, a white woman (Mireille Perrier) returns to the town in Cameroon where she spent her childhood. There, she reflects on her past, including her relationship with Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), a Black servant with whom she formed a friendship while not fully grasping the divides that governed their worlds. Already displaying many of Denis's artistic signatures—including an immersive sense of place; an elliptical approach to storytelling; and an interest in complex dynamics of race, sex, and power—Chocolat is an evocatively impressionistic yet piercingly precise examination of the psychology of colonialism.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW 4K RESTORATION, supervised and approved by director Claire Denis and director of photography Robert Alazraki, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- New interview with Denis
- Interview with actor Isaac de Bankolé from 2011
- Newsreel footage from the film's Cannes premiere
- Trailers
- New English subtitle translation
- ?PLUS: An essay by critic Jennifer Wilson
Parasite 4K Blu-ray
Description: A zeitgeist-defining sensation that distilled a global reckoning over class inequality into a tour de force of pop-cinema subversion, Bong Joon Ho's genre-scrambling black-comic thriller confirms his status as one of the world's foremost filmmakers. Two families in Seoul—one barely scraping by in a dank semibasement in a low-lying neighborhood, the other living in luxury in a modern architectural marvel overlooking the city—become entwined in a dangerous relationship that will lay bare the dark contradictions of capitalism with shocking ferocity. A bravura showcase for its director's meticulously constructed set pieces, bolstered by a brilliant ensemble cast and stunning production design, Parasite cemented the New Korean Cinema as an undeniable international force when it swept almost every major prize from the Cannes Film Festival to the Academy Awards, where it made history as the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- FOUR-DISC (TWO 4K BLU-RAYS/TWO BLU-RAYS) COMBO PACK RELEASE
- 4K digital master of the color version of the film, approved by director Bong Joon Ho and director of photography Hong Kyung Pyo, presented in HDR with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
- 4K digital master of the black-and-white version of the film, approved by Bong and Hong, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack and an introduction by Bong
- Audio commentary featuring Bong and critic Tony Rayns
- Conversation between Bong and critic Darcy Paquet
- Interviews with Hong, production designer Lee Ha Jun, and editor Yang Jinmo
- Program about the New Korean Cinema movement featuring Bong and filmmaker Park Chan-wook
- Cannes Film Festival press conference from 2019 featuring Bong and members of the cast
- Masterclass featuring Bong from the 2019 Lumière Festival in Lyon, France
- Storyboard comparison
- Trailers
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Amy Taubin
Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, No. 6
Description: Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project has maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of more than seventy restorations of works by essential filmmakers. This collector's set gathers four arresting and stylistically distinctive films, ranging from the politically charged to the mythical and dreamlike, from Guinea-Bissau (Mortu nega), Brazil (São Paulo, Incorporated), Côte d'Ivoire (The Woman with the Knife), and Iran (The Stranger and the Fog). Each title is a significant contribution to the art form and a window onto a cinematic tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.
Mortu nega
A soulful, bottom-up portrait of a country finding its postcolonial identity, Mortu nega follows the determined Diminga (Bia Gomes) as she journeys to the front lines in search of her soldier husband during the final days of Guinea-Bissau's war for liberation from Portugal. After freedom is won, Diminga and her compatriots must maintain a steely resolve in the face of a host of daily challenges: accessing health care, navigating the state bureaucracy, and confronting a devastating drought. Directed with fierce commitment by Flora Gomes, a student of anticolonial leader Amílcar Cabral's, Mortu nega offers a clarion call for strength and healing through unity.
Mortu nega was restored in 2025 by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Flora Gomes. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers, and UNESCO, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Arsenal–Institut für Film und Videokunst.
São Paulo, Incorporated
Writer-director Luiz Sérgio Person's debut feature is a masterly vision of existential unrest in Saõ Paulo amid the mass industrialization of the 1960s. This bracingly modernist, puzzlelike film follows Carlos (Walmor Chagas), a middle-class auto-industry employee, as he questions his relationships with romantic partners past and present (played by Darlene Glória, Ana Esmeralda, and Eva Wilma), as well as his participation in the transforming economy. A kind of city symphony filled with striking, dynamic images of a rapidly changing urban landscape, São Paulo, Incorporated is a cry of rebellion against a suffocating push to modernize, and one of the landmark works of Brazilian cinema.
São Paulo, Incorporated was restored in 2025 by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata, Cinemateca Brasileira, and JLS Facilidades Sonoras–Estúdio JLS, in association with Cinemateca Brasileira, Lauper Films Ltda, and the family of Luiz Sérgio Person. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to the Italian Institute of Culture in São Paulo.
The Woman with the Knife
Equal parts symbolist psychodrama and shamanic ghost story, The Woman with the Knife delivers a surreal investigation of fractured identity. The sole feature by trailblazing Ivorian filmmaker Timité Bassori stars the writer-director himself as a bourgeois intellectual whose life is thrown into turmoil after he experiences a disturbing vision of a mysterious, knife-wielding woman—the beginning of a crisis that forces him to confront his deep-seated sexual repression and social alienation. Capturing the streetscapes of 1960s Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, in New Wave–cool black and white, and set to a dreamy mix of American jazz and West African pop, this touchstone work of African cinema is a daring and complex journey into the postcolonial unconscious.
The Woman with the Knife was restored in 2019 by the Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, at L'Immagine Ritrovata. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers, and UNESCO, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
The Stranger and the Fog
Forged in rhythm, ritual, and mysticism, this masterwork by Iranian New Wave legend Bahram Beyzaie is a transfixing allegory shot through with the fear of a mysterious, encroaching force. When a boat carrying a severely wounded man (Khosrow Shojazadeh) drifts onto the shore of a small coastal village, most of the community regards him with suspicion. But the quietly confident Rana (Parvaneh Massoumi), whose husband disappeared a year ago at sea, finds herself drawn to the outsider. The Stranger and the Fog, which was banned in Iran following the 1979 revolution, is a film of overwhelming power, possessing both the epic dimensions of myth and the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream.
The Stranger and the Fog was restored in 2023 by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Bahram Beyzaie. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Ehsan Khoshbakht and Mojdeh Shamsaie.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- New 4K digital restorations of Mortu nega; São Paulo, Incorporated; The Woman with the Knife; and The Stranger and the Fog, all overseen by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
- New introductions by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese
- New interviews featuring director Flora Gomes (on Mortu nega) and filmmaker Walter Salles (on São Paulo, Incorporated) and excerpted archival interviews with director Bahram Beyzaie and actor Parvaneh Massoumi (on The Stranger and the Fog)
- New documentary featuring Timité Bassori, director of The Woman with the Knife; actor Bienvenu Neba; cameraman N'Gouan Kacou; and art historian Yacouba Konaté
- The Return of Amílcar Cabral (1976), a documentary short codirected by Gomes, in a new 4K restoration by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna
- Updated English subtitle translations
- PLUS: Essays by critics and scholars Yasmina Price, Fábio Andrade, Chrystel Olouköi, and Ehsan Khoshbakht