Here’s What’s Streaming on The Criterion Channel in June 2025
The Criterion Channel has announced the titles launching on their platform in June 2025, including collections featuring the films of Gene Hackman and Johnnie To, a huge assortment of LGBTQ+ titles, memorable swimming pools in film, and the films of Patricia Highsmith’s dastardly Tom Ripley.
Here’s the full breakdown:
TOP STORIES
In the Deep End: Swimming Pools On-Screen
Take a dip in some of cinema’s most memorable swimming pools—those uncanny, aqueous environs where interior collides with exterior, the private flirts with the public, and time seems suspended above the watermark. Serving variously as sites of adolescent sexual awakening in coming-of-age portraits like Deep End and Water Lilies, symbols of suburban middle-class malaise in New Hollywood touchstones like The Graduate and The Swimmer, and dangerously seductive backdrops for sun-splashed thrillers such as La piscine and Sexy Beast, swimming pools have proven uniquely cinematic settings—by turns glamorous, unsettling, sensuous, and surreal stages for provocatively charged, heightened human drama.
FEATURING: The Graduate (1967), The Swimmer (1968), La piscine (1969), Deep End (1970), A Bigger Splash (1973), A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974), 3 Women (1977), Wild Things (1998), La Ciénaga (2001), Fat Girl (2001), Sexy Beast (2000), Water Lilies (2007)
Ripley Films
Featuring Loving Highsmith (2022), a feature-length documentary on author Patricia Highsmith
Wicked charmer, sociopath, con artist, and killer, Tom Ripley is one of literature and cinema’s most enduring and enigmatic antiheroes. The slippery and seductive schemer at the center of Patricia Highsmith’s celebrated series of crime novels, Ripley has captivated filmmakers across generations, continents, and genres in a number of acclaimed film adaptations, proving an irresistible cipher for directors, actors, and viewers alike. As played by Alain Delon (Purple Noon), Dennis Hopper (The American Friend), Matt Damon (The Talented Mr. Ripley), and John Malkovich (Ripley’s Game), he continuously shape-shifts—by turns charismatic, chilling, queer, cultured, calculating, monstrous, and strangely sympathetic—becoming a dark-sided mirror of the anxieties and desires of his surroundings.
FEATURING: Purple Noon (1960), The American Friend (1977), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)*, Ripley’s Game (2002)
Celebrating Gene Hackman
Perhaps no actor embodied the pervasive anxiety and unsettling moral ambiguity of the New Hollywood era as fully as Gene Hackman. With his nuanced, unfailingly realistic approach to acting, Hackman brought a moody intensity to defining films of the 1970s like The French Connection and Night Moves, tapping into the paranoia and downbeat disillusionment of the era. With late-career triumphs like The Royal Tenenbaums, Hackman remained one of the most respected veterans of his generation, a consummate character craftsman who could bridge the fallible and the heroic with unmatched authenticity.
FEATURING: The French Connection (1971), Scarecrow (1973), Night Moves (1975), Eureka (1983), No Way Out (1987), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
René Clair’s Inventive Enchantments
Farce and fantasy, satire and surrealism mingle in the exuberantly imaginative, elegantly witty films of pioneering French director René Clair, one of the most brilliant innovators of cinema’s foundational decades. Clair’s early silent films, like the Dadaist short Entr’acte and the inventive science-fiction comedy Paris qui dort, were rooted in the spirit of the Parisian avant-garde, bursting with a formal playfulness that he would carry into the early sound era in international triumphs like the enchanting musical romance Under the Roofs of Paris and the irresistible comic delight À nous la liberté, which made brilliantly innovative use of the new sound technology. Outside of France, Clair brought his Gallic sophistication to both England and Hollywood, where he produced charming comic fantasias like The Ghost Goes West, I Married a Witch, and It Happened Tomorrow that sparkle with the whimsy and irrepressible creativity that defined his work.
FEATURING: Entr’acte (1924), Paris qui dort (1924), Two Timid Souls (1928), The Italian Straw Hat (1928), Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), À nous la liberté (1931), Le million (1931), Quatorze juillet (1933), The Ghost Goes West (1935), I Married a Witch (1942), It Happened Tomorrow (1944), Les grandes manoeuvres (1955)
Queersighted: Coming of Age
Coming-of-age films reflect the emotional experience of queerness better than any other kind. Buffeted by waves of adolescent desire and the contortions of self-identification, they often defy convention and category. Selected by series curator Michael Koresky and special guest Jane Schoenbrun (director of I Saw the TV Glow), the films in this installment of Queersighted run the gamut of expression and genre, from classic American melodrama (Tea and Sympathy) to Japanese anime (Liz and the Blue Bird) to campy comedy (Addams Family Values), from schlocky violence to tranquil interiority. But they have something crucial in common: the ability to speak to viewers, whether explicitly or under the surface, about the beauty of cultivating individuality amid a sea of stultifying normality.
FEATURING: Tea and Sympathy (1956), The Long Day Closes (1992), Addams Family Values (1993), Hide and Seek (1996), Nowhere (1997), D.E.B.S. (2004), Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015), Liz and the Blue Bird (2018)
Johnnie To Essentials
A prolific and masterful stylist whose work spans many genres, Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To is most celebrated internationally for his virtuosic action thrillers. Pulsing with kinetic intensity, these movies blend choreographed violence and moral push-and-pull, transforming the heroic-bloodshed genre into something more contemplative, operatic, and idiosyncratic. Often working through his own production company, Milkyway Image, To crafts urban noir tapestries where loyalty and fate collide amid impressive set pieces that set the screen aglow with neon and gunfire. These essential thrillers—including some of his most dazzling achievements like PTU, Throw Down, and Election—double as deeply cinematic meditations on camaraderie, fate, and the intricate codes that bind lovers and adversaries.
FEATURING: The Heroic Trio (1993), Executioners (1993), PTU (2003), Breaking News (2004), Throw Down (2004), Election (2005), Exiled (2006), Mad Detective (2007)*, Life Without Principle (2011), Drug War (2012), Blind Detective (2013), Three (2016)
LGBTQ+ Favorites
Proud, rebellious, colorful, intimate, and frank, these visions of LGBTQ+ life include beloved modern classics as well as hidden gems. From staples of the art-house canon (Je tu il elle, Querelle) to highlights of the New Queer Cinema explosion (Poison, Nowhere) and landmark documentaries (Paris Is Burning, The Times of Harvey Milk), these films represent just a sample of the wide world of queer cinema, but they offer a taste of its breadth, creativity, and defiance in the face of adversity.
FEATURING: Portrait of Jason (1967), Ju tu il elle (1975), Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977), Jubilee (1978), Querelle (1982), Born in Flames (1983), The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), Desert Hearts (1985), Mala Noche (1985), Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), Tongues Untied (1989), Paris Is Burning (1990), A Place of Rage (1991), Poison (1991), Young Soul Rebels (1991), Totally F***Ed Up (1993), The Watermelon Woman (1996), Happy Together (1997), Nowhere (1997), Benjamin Smoke (2000), Gypsy 83 (2001), Lan Yu (2001), Weekend (2011), Stranger by the Lake (2013), A Prince (2023)
EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES
Vermiglio
Featuring a new interview with director Maura Delpero, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series
Secrets swirl beneath the surface of a remote Italian community in Maura Delpero’s exquisite wartime drama, winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize. In a majestic Alpine village touched only faintly by the upheavals of modern life, a strict schoolteacher’s family undergoes a profound shift when a mysterious Sicilian soldier arrives fleeing the front lines of World War II. As the seasons change, the family’s three very different daughters will each find their lives transformed. Blending historically grounded realism with painterly grace, Delpero draws from her own family’s history for an at once intimate and momentous vision of a world suspended between the patriarchal past and the stirrings of a new future.
CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)
Criterion Collection Edition #1255
Gene Hackman oozes world-weary cynicism as a private investigator searching for an actress’s missing daughter in Arthur Penn’s haunting neonoir.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by author Matthew Asprey Gear, interviews with Penn, a behind-the-scenes featurette, and more.
A Poem Is a Naked Person (Les Blank, 1974)
Criterion Collection Edition #805
Les Blank’s documentary portrait of singer-songwriter Leon Russell is a work of rough beauty that serves as testament to Blank’s cinematic daring and Russell’s immense musical talents.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Excerpts from a Q&A with Blank, a conversation between Russell and Harrod Blank, a documentary on the making of the film, and more.
Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring (Claude Berri, 1986)
Criterion Collection Edition #1257
A sprawling tale of greed, betrayal, and revenge plays out amid the bucolic splendor of the French countryside in Claude Berri’s masterly two-film adaptation of a literary work by the legendary Marcel Pagnol.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Claude Berri: The Card Dealer (2018), a documentary on Berri’s life and career; and The Force of Destiny (2017), a documentary about the making of the films.
DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS
Alan Rudolph’s Dramas of Desire
Alan Rudolph’s cinema is a constellation of dreamers, drifters, and disenchanted romantics. A protégé of Robert Altman and a singular voice in independent film, Rudolph has long been a maverick, eschewing convention in favor of elliptical storytelling, painterly compositions, and jazz-inflected rhythms. His films—including the tour-de-force Geraldine Chaplin thriller Remember My Name and the surreally stylish neonoir Trouble in Mind—invite us into richly textured worlds where emotional logic supersedes plot, and the ephemeral becomes eternal.
FEATURING: Remember My Name (1978), Trouble In Mind (1985), Afterglow (1997), Breakfast of Champions (1999)
Directed by Ougie Pak
An intriguing new voice in independent cinema, Korean American filmmaker Ougie Pak combines a strong, atmospheric feeling for place with a nuanced understanding of the subtle shifts in human relationships. Whether training his camera on a woozy New York City as seen through the eyes of a lovelorn tourist in Sunrise/Sunset, the disturbing power dynamics coursing through a Korean theater troupe rehearsing a production on the coast of Greece in Clytaemnestra, or the fraught personal and professional relationships at play in a Taiwanese American hostess club in Red Card, he employs careful framing and quiet moments of telling detail to imbue his works with a unique sensitivity and psychological depth.
FEATURING: Sunrise/Sunset (2019), Clytaemnestra (2021), Red Card (2023)
Two Films by Amy Holden Jones
Beginning her career as an editor for Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby, Amy Holden Jones soon proved her own skill as a director with the Roger Corman–produced cult classic The Slumber Party Massacre, a uniquely sophisticated, subversive take on the slasher genre in which she made brilliantly economical use of a limited budget. That film’s success allowed her to next direct her own script, resulting in Love Letters, a multilayered exploration of a forbidden love affair—featuring a riveting performance from Jamie Lee Curtis—that revealed Jones to be a dramatist of uncompromising psychological complexity.
FEATURING: The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), Love Letters (1983)
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA
The Trip: The Complete Series*
Packed with delectable feasts of divine food, glorious international locales, and uproarious comic interplay, the The Trip series—appearing here in both its complete original television presentation and its theatrical cuts—follows live-wire improvisational geniuses Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as they road-trip across Europe in search of the finest local cuisines. Along the way, the pair spar, bicker, and trade hilarious, barbed banter—including their priceless celebrity impressions of everyone from Michael Caine to Sean Connery to Al Pacino—while offering disarmingly poignant reflections on life, friendship, family, and aging.
FEATURING: The Trip (2011)*, The Trip to Italy (2014)*, The Trip to Spain (2017)*, The Trip to Greece (2020)*
Kill Zone 2
A nonstop series of blistering, bone-crunching action set pieces light up this giddily frenetic, melodramatic stew of dirty cops, prison riots, and black-market organ transplants.
DOCUMENTARIES
Hummingbirds
In a Texas border town, two best friends make magic of one last summer together as they face uncertain futures.
AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS
Poison
One of the most controversial and celebrated films of the 1990s, Todd Haynes’s New Queer Cinema landmark is an audacious, visually ecstatic homage to the transgressive spirit of Jean Genet.
Gypsy 83
The music of Stevie Nicks is the siren song that calls a superfan and her gay goth best from small-town Ohio to the Big Apple in Todd Stephens’s cult-favorite road movie.
Mapplethorpe
Delve into the bohemian artistic and sexual world of controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who captured eroticism in a way that had never been seen before.
MUSIC FILMS
Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets*
Sing along with the common people in this exuberant, appropriately offbeat tribute to the charmingly cheeky Britpop legends as they take the stage for their farewell show.
Richard Ayoade x Kim Deal x The Breeders
Singularly brilliant filmmaker and cult comedian Richard Ayoade brings his off-kilter imagination to a pair of visually and sonically ecstatic music videos for indie-rock legend Kim Deal and her band the Breeders.
FEATURING: Spacewoman (2018), Big Ben Beat (2025)
Rude Boy
See the Clash at the fiery, dizzying peak of their powers in this vivid docufiction portrait of 1970s British social unrest.
LGBTQ+ Shorts
Stories of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and the simple but radical, often dangerous act of just existing as a queer person are on display in these empathetic and innovative shorts, which reflect the wide spectrum of experiences that make up the LGBTQ+ rainbow.
FEATURING: Greetings from Washington, D.C. (1981), Janine (1990), She Don’t Fade (1991), Max (1992), Pull Your Head to the Moon: Stories of Creole Women (1992), Stafford’s Story (1992), Vanilla Sex (1992), Ifé (1993), The Potluck and the Passion (1993), Trans (1994), Greetings from Africa (1996), I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard (2012), Blood Below the Skin (2015), The Foundation (2015), Vámonos (2015), 100 Boyfriends Mixtape (2016), Walk for Me (2016), Bayard & Me (2017), Flores (2017), T (2019), Dirty (2020), Another Hayride (2021), i get so sad sometimes (2021), The Man of My Dreams (2021), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here (2021), Bold Eagle (2022), Monsier le Butch (2022), A Place on the Edge of Breath (2022), Pete (2022), How to Carry Water (2023), MnM (2023), The Script (2023), Vermont (2023), The Callers (2024), God Is Good (2024), Grace (2024)
So much good stuff…