Here’s What’s Coming to The Criterion Channel in September 2025
The Criterion Channel has announced the titles arriving on their platform in September 2025, including collections featuring the films of Jodie Foster and director Robert Altman, a spotlight on 70s thrillers, plus Criterion Collection editions of William Friedkin’s SORCERER and Olivier Assayas’ CARLOS.
Here’s the full breakdown:
TOP STORIES
Directed by Robert Altman
Featuring a new introduction by critic Sean Fennessey
Born one hundred years ago, Robert Altman made movies that play like the cinematic equivalent of jazz—elastic, improvisational, and thrillingly alive to chance and happenstance. A master of the ensemble epic whose maverick sensibility stood out even in the auteur-driven New Hollywood era, Altman put his subversive, stylistically freewheeling spin on everything from the war movie (MASH) to the western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) to the buddy comedy (California Split) to the art-house psychodrama (3 Women), crafting incisive studies of the American mythos that prioritize spiky moments of character interaction over narrative convention. Imitated by many, matched by none, Altman’s films are worlds unto themselves, teeming with more humanity than a single story can contain.
Programmed by Sean Fennessey
FEATURING: Countdown (1967), That Cold Day in the Park (1969)*, MASH(1970), Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), 3 Women (1977), Quintet (1979), A Perfect Couple (1979), Popeye (1980)*, Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), Secret Honor (1984), Fool for Love (1985), Tanner ’88 (1988), Vincent & Theo (1990), The Player (1992), Prêt-à-Porter (1994)*, Dr. T & the Women (2000), Gosford Park (2001), The Company (2003), A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
Starring Jodie Foster
Few actors bring as much intensity or intelligence to the screen as Jodie Foster, a veteran who has spent nearly her entire life in front of the camera. Already a formidable screen presence at just twelve years old when she delivered her indelible breakthrough performance in Taxi Driver, she subsequently established herself as one of the most acclaimed performers of her generation, equally riveting in human dramas like Nell and genre blockbusters like Panic Room, while making an assured transition to directing with films like Little Man Tate and The Beaver. At every step of the way, Foster has defied typecasting and redefined what a Hollywood career could look like, forging a body of work that is fiercely brainy, emotionally layered, and quietly radical in its refusal to play by anyone else’s rules.
FEATURING: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Bugsy Malone (1976), Five Corners (1987), Stealing Home (1988), Little Man Tate (1991), Shadows and Fog (1991), Sommersby (1993), Nell (1994), Panic Room(2002), The Beaver (2011)
’70s Thrillers
Suspicion hung in the air like stale smoke throughout the 1970s. In the shadow of Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the public’s unraveling faith in its institutions, American filmmakers crafted taut, paranoid narratives that echoed the disillusioned national mood. This collection brings together some of the era’s most incisive works by leading directors like Sidney Lumet (The Anderson Tapes), Robert Altman (The Long Goodbye), Alan J. Pakula (The Parallax View), and Arthur Penn (Night Moves), films in which surveillance is omnipresent, authority is suspect, and truth is a moving target. Updating classic Hollywood models—including film noir and Hitchcockian mystery—for their anxious time, these thrillers remain just as urgently unsettling in our own age of disinformation and institutional erosion.
FEATURING: The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Sisters(1973), Chinatown (1974)*, The Parallax View (1974), Night Moves (1975), Obsession (1976), Sorcerer (1977), Winter Kills (1979)
Nunsploitation
Delve into shadowy cloisters with an unholy congregation of films that scramble the sacred and the profane through lurid tales of nuns gone wild. From the fevered blasphemy of Ken Russell’s The Devils and the delirious hysteria of Alucarda to the surrealist sacrilege of Pedro Almodóvar’s Dark Habits and the gun-wielding vengeance of Ms .45, these shocking cinematic transgressions unveil the convent as a site of repression, ecstasy, and revolt, offering a baroque and often radical vision of female fury, desire, and faith gone feral.
FEATURING: Häxan (1922), The Devils (1971), To the Devil a Daughter (1976), Alucarda (1977), Behind Convent Walls (1978), Killer Nun (1979), Ms .45 (1981), Dark Habits (1983)*, Benedetta (2021)*
Alan J. Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy
Steeped in the pervasive sense of distrust that rippled through American society in the 1970s, Alan J. Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy—Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President’s Men—stands as a masterclass in cinematic unease. Featuring career-defining performances from Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, and Dustin Hoffman, these chilling visions of conspiracy and steadily mounting dread translate paranoia into unforgettable visual language through the shadow-etched cinematography of Gordon Willis, whose moody chiaroscuro compositions draw viewers into a world of ever-deepening mystery and fear.
FEATURING: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), All the President’s Men(1976)
EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES
Union
Through intimate observation, Union chronicles the extraordinary efforts of an unlikely group of warehouse workers as they launch a grassroots labor-organizing campaign at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island. Led by the charismatic but underestimated Chris Smalls, the diverse band of workers start the Amazon Labor Union and embark on an extraordinary uphill battle against one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, while simultaneously navigating divisions within their own ranks. Filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing document the struggle from up close, offering a gripping human drama about the fight for power and dignity in today’s globalized economic landscape.
CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS
Grey Gardens (David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer, 1976)
Criterion Collection Edition #123
50th anniversary
Meet Big and Little Edie Beale—mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive relatives of Jackie Onassis—whose world of decaying dreams is captured with unforgettable intimacy in one of the most beloved and influential documentaries all time.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: The Beales of Grey Gardens, the 2006 sequel to the film; audio commentary by the filmmakers; audio excerpts from an interview with Little Edie Beale; and more.
The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)
Criterion Collection Edition #1261
The beauty, poignancy, and mystery of simply being alive comes into astonishing focus in one of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest cinematic gifts.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A documentary on the making of the film, an interview with Kiarostami, and a video essay presenting Kiarostami’s poetry.
Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977)
Criterion Collection Edition #1267
One of the boldest auteur statements of the 1970s New Hollywood, William Friedkin’s pulse-pounding reworking of the suspense classic The Wages of Fear is a hallucinatory journey into the heart of darkness.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: The documentary Friedkin Uncut (2018), a conversation between filmmaker James Gray and critic Sean Fennessey, a conversation between Friedkin and filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, and more.
Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005)
Criterion Collection Edition #1026
From the singularly brilliant imagination of Miranda July comes a compassionate, startling comedy about the tortuous routes we take to intimacy in an isolating world.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A program featuring July and filmmaker Lena Dunham in conversation, short films by July, footage from her 2003 Sundance Directors Lab, and more.
Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010)
Criterion Collection Edition #582
Olivier Assayas’s intensely detailed period epic is an electrifying portrait of the infamous international terrorist Carlos the Jackal as both swaggering global gangster and symbol of seismic political shifts around the world.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Assayas, actor Édgar Ramírez, and cinematographer Denis Lenoir; selected-scene commentary featuring Lenoir; documentaries on the real-life Carlos the Jackal; and more.
Tanner ’88 (Robert Altman, 1988)
Criterion Collection Edition #258
In 1988, Robert Altman and Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau created a presidential candidate to run alongside real-life hopefuls in primary season, resulting in a piercing, genre-scrambling satire of American politics.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A conversation between series creators Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau.
REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS
City of Ghosts
Matt Dillon made a dynamic directorial debut with this feverishly atmospheric neonoir, which he cowrote with novelist (and David Lynch collaborator) Barry Gifford. After their insurance scam sparks an FBI investigation, front man Jimmy Cremmins (Dillon) flees to Cambodia to meet his mentor, Marvin (James Caan). But Jimmy gets more than he bargains for when, against a backdrop of raw, dangerous beauty and ever-shifting loyalties, Marvin draws him into a web of deceit and murder from which there may be no way out. Evocative location shooting in the Cambodian jungle and supporting turns from Gerard Depardieu and Stellan Skarsgård add plenty of color to this propulsive pulp thriller.
Fresh Kill
Taiwanese-born new-media visionary Shu Lea Cheang directs this avant-anarcho ecosatire, in which a lesbian couple—winningly played by Erin McMurtry and Sarita Choudhury, star of Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala—living on Staten Island find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous television commercials, and deadly cat food. Envisioning New York City as a toxic waste dump of consumerist detritus, Fresh Kill offers a bracing, queer feminist response to the patriarchal poison of corporate capitalism.
Undercurrent
Exquisitely lensed in gorgeous color by master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, this sublimely subversive melodrama employs ravishing mise-en-scène to lend layers of subtextual meaning to the story of Kiwa (Fujiko Yamamoto), an independent-minded kimono designer in Kyoto who rebuffs the advances of various men to focus on her craft—until she falls in love with a married scientist (Ken Uehara) and faces a stark choice. Undercurrent was one of a string of postwar dramas focusing on the experiences of women made by unsung director Kozaburo Yoshimura, whose work is ripe for rediscovery for its incisive portrayal of shifting gender and social roles in a rapidly modernizing Japan.
DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS
Two by Paul Thomas Anderson
Celebrate the release of the latest much-anticipated opus by Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another, by revisiting two of the touchstone works that established him as one of contemporary American cinema’s most revered auteurs. With a virtuoso ensemble cast that includes Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Julianne Moore, Magnolia is a sprawling mosaic of human pain, catharsis, and connection that found the director pushing toward heights of dazzling, operatic ambition. Its follow-up, the sublimely poignant, unconventional romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love, revealed a lighter but no less profound side of his artistry, while giving Adam Sandler one of his finest roles to date.
FEATURING: Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Documentaries by Alain Kassanda
One of the most exciting emerging voices in African cinema, Congolese French filmmaker Alain Kassanda makes immersive, thought-provoking documentaries that connect the lived experiences of everyday people to larger social and political questions. Turning his observant camera on both his grandparents (Colette and Justin), whose lives were shaped by Belgian colonialism, and on Nigeria’s younger generation (Trouble Sleep, Coconut Head Generation), Kassanda crafts eloquent, dynamic, politically engaged films that question existing power structures and offer a vital corrective to reductive images of contemporary Africa.
FEATURING: Trouble Sleep (2020), Colette and Justin (2022), Coconut Head Generation (2023)
Two by Walerian Borowczyk
Tantalizingly surreal, dreamily erotic, and wickedly subversive, the films of Polish provocateur Walerian Borowczyk are symbol-laden existential reveries rendered in painterly soft focus. Made in the midst of his most notorious period, the grief-suffused psychosexual drama La marge and the blasphemous nunsploitation shocker Behind Convent Walls are fascinating variations on his recurring themes of religious and sexual repression, shot through with the strange beauty and unsettling ambiguity that lend his films their haunting power.
FEATURING: La marge (1976), Behind Convent Walls (1978)
ANIME
Millennium Actress
A documentary crew gets pulled into a veteran actor’s memories—where the lines between reality and fiction blur—in Satoshi Kon’s audaciously meta journey through Japanese cinema history.
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA
Pamfir*
Charged with an almost demonic intensity, this electrifying Ukrainian thriller pushes the gritty gangster drama into dimensions of feverish, folkloric unreality.
Marcello mio*
The daughter of screen legends Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni playfully deconstructs her own illustrious lineage in this charmingly mischievous meta-cinematic bonbon from director Christophe Honoré.
INTERNATIONAL CLASSICS
Possession
With its pulsating score, visceral imagery, and legendarily intense performances from Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other.
DOCUMENTARIES
Celluloid Underground
The true story of an underground cinematheque that safeguarded thousands of banned 35 mm film prints in postrevolutionary Iran, this riveting autobiographical documentary is a stirring testament to the power of cinema to resist tyranny.
Europe Endless 1: The Spectre of Eurocommunism
Pioneering cultural theorist Colin MacCabe explores the legacy of the 1970s leftist movement that sought to adapt communism to Western Europe in this playfully discursive, intellectually omnivorous cine-essay à la Chris Marker.
MUSIC FILMS
ANOHNI: TURNING and Five Music Videos
Built around her ineffably plaintive voice, the music of ANOHNI speaks to the soul like no other, entwining aching human emotion with a cutting political edge. Curated by ANOHNI herself, this selection of music videos—presented alongside the performance-art concert documentary Turning, made in collaboration with Charles Atlas—extends her transcendent sonic world into a richly symbolic visual language, drawing on influences from queer performance, experimental cinema, political-protest imagery, and elemental natural forms. Each is a carefully chosen collaboration with fellow artists and icons—including Lorraine O’Grady, Naomi Campbell, and Marina Abramović—that deepens the emotional resonance of her music.
FEATURING: Hope There’s Someone (2005), Another World (2008), Cut the World (2012), TURNING (2012), Drone Bomb Me (2016), Marrow (2016)
AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS
Towheads
Keatonesque slapstick meets woman-on-the-edge psychodrama in this singular, tonally audacious exploration of modern motherhood, performance, and identity.
NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS
Premiering September 1 in ’90s Soundtrack Movies: The Crow*
This seductively grungy, operatically stylized thriller has achieved cult immortality thanks in part to a darkly ravishing soundtrack featuring the Cure, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Rage Against the Machine, and more.
Coming to the Criterion Channel next month…