Eyes Wide Shut, House Party, Breakfast Club 4K & More Coming to the Criterion Collection November 2025
Coming in November from the Criterion Collection: Eyes Wide Shut, a tantalizing labyrinth crafted by Stanley Kubrick, one of cinema’s greatest visionaries; Él, a warped tale of wayward love from surrealist master Luis Buñuel; House Party, Reginald Hudlin’s feel-good comedy snapshot of 1990s hip-hop culture; and Hell’s Angels, a high-flying feat of adventure filmmaking, directed by Howard Hughes. Plus: The Breakfast Club, John Hughes’s era-defining pop-culture phenomenon, now on 4K UHD; and Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s extraordinary document of a fearless director, now on 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Also this month, Eclipse from Criterion presents Abbas Kiarostami: Early Shorts and Features, a selection of early works from a legend of world cinema.
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THE BREAKFAST CLUB
1985 • 97 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
What happens when five strangers end up together in Saturday detention? Badass posturing, gleeful misbehavior, and a potent dose of angst. With this exuberant, disarmingly candid film, writer-director John Hughes established himself as the bard of American youth, vividly and empathetically capturing how teenagers hang out, act up, and goof off. The Breakfast Club brings together an assortment of adolescent archetypes—the uptight popular girl (Molly Ringwald), the stoic jock (Emilio Estevez), the foulmouthed rebel (Judd Nelson), the virginal bookworm (Anthony Michael Hall), and the kooky recluse (Ally Sheedy)—and watches them shed their personae and emerge into unlikely friendships. With its highly quotable dialogue and star-making performances, this exploration of the trials of adolescence became an era-defining pop-culture phenomenon, one whose influence now spans generations.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary featuring actors Anthony Michael Hall and Judd Nelson
- Interviews with actors Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy and other members of the cast and crew
- Video essay featuring director John Hughes’s production notes, read by Nelson
- Fifty minutes of deleted and extended scenes
- Promotional and archival interviews
- Excerpts from a 1985 American Film Institute seminar with Hughes
- Radio interview with Hughes
- Audio interview with Ringwald from an episode of This American Life
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author and critic David Kamp
Available November 4, 2025
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HOUSE PARTY
1990 • 104 minutes • Color • 4.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
In this dazzlingly imaginative teen comedy, the breakthrough feature debut by writer-director Reginald Hudlin, hip-hop duo Kid ’n Play bring their star power to the big screen as aspiring MCs preparing for the party of the year. When Kid’s father (Robin Harris) forbids him from attending Play’s party, Kid sneaks out anyway, kicking off a wild night full of dance-offs and rap battles, run-ins with bullies and cops, and a bit of romance. With an ensemble cast that also includes Tisha Campbell, AJ Johnson, Martin Lawrence, Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, and members of the music group Full Force, plus a hit soundtrack, House Party is a beloved, feel-good snapshot of early-1990s hip-hop culture that brought Black teenage experience to the mainstream, and that shines bright to this day.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Peter Deming and approved by writer-director Reginald Hudlin, with 4.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New audio commentary featuring Hudlin
- New conversation featuring Hudlin, producer Warrington Hudlin, and film scholar Racquel Gates
- New cast reunion featuring actors B-Fine, Bowlegged Lou, and the Legend Paul Anthony of Full Force; Tisha Campbell; AJ Johnson; Christopher “Play” Martin; Daryl “Chill” Mitchell; and Christopher “Kid” Reid
- House Party (1983), the student short by Reginald Hudlin on which his feature is based
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author Michael Harriot
Available November 11, 2025
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BURDEN OF DREAMS
1982 • 96 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In English, German, Spanish, and Indigenous Peruvian languages with English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
For nearly five years, acclaimed German director Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult projects of his career: Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this production, made more perilous by Herzog’s determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of Indigenous locals to pull a full-size 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless directors.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised by filmmaker Harrod Blank, director Les Blank’s son, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Alternate uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary featuring Les Blank, editor and sound recordist Maureen Gosling, and Fitzcarraldo director Werner Herzog
- Interview with Herzog
- Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), a short film by Blank
- Deleted scenes
- Behind-the-scenes photos taken by Gosling
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Paul Arthur and, in the 4K, a book of excerpts from Blank’s and Gosling’s production journals
Available November 11, 2025
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ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: EARLY SHORTS AND FEATURES
PART OF ECLIPSE FROM CRITERION
1970–1989 • 593 minutes • Color/Black & White • Monaural • In Persian with English subtitles • 1.37:1, 1.66:1, 1.85:1 aspect ratios
Long before he became one of the most renowned artists in world cinema, the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami began his cinematic career at Tehran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (a.k.a. Kanoon), where he honed his distinctive style and themes. During his first decades as a filmmaker, Kiarostami moved freely among documentary, narrative, and even animation, and between joyous short films made for children and subtle works exploring the struggles of adolescents. Often using the classroom as a laboratory, he probed social and political tensions in Iranian society during the turbulent years before and after the 1979 revolution. Spanning his very first short, Bread and Alley (which the director called the “mother of all my films”); other underseen early revelations, like Experience and The Traveler; and nonfiction masterpieces such as Homework, the graceful, warm, and playful works collected here find moments of transcendent poetry within everyday life, and use deceptively simple premises to express universal truths about the human condition.
Bread and Alley • Breaktime • Experience
Available November 18, 2025
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HELL’S ANGELS
1930 • 132 minutes • Black & White/Color • Monaural • 1.37:1 and 1.54:1 aspect ratios
A high-flying feat of adventure filmmaking and a testament to the audacious, spare-no-expense vision of Howard Hughes, this landmark aviation epic remains exhilarating both for its daredevil aerial sequences and its nervy pre-Code punch. With the onset of World War I, two British brothers recruited into the Royal Flying Corps (Ben Lyon and James Hall) find their bond tested by their differing attitudes toward the war and their love for the same woman (Jean Harlow in her bombshell breakthrough). The product of a notoriously long and dangerous production that resulted in the deaths of multiple crew members, Hell’s Angels broke new technical ground, making use of early sound and color technologies, and capturing some of the most thrilling dogfight scenes ever filmed.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration of the Magnascope road-show version, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New interview with Robert Legato, the visual-effects supervisor for the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, on the groundbreaking aerial visuals of Hell’s Angels
- New interview with critic Farran Smith Nehme about actor Jean Harlow
- Outtakes and rushes from the film, with commentary by Harlow biographer David Stenn
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author and journalist Fred Kaplan
Available November 18, 2025
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ÉL
1953 • 93 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Spanish with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio
Spanish surrealist master Luis Buñuel’s fiendish tale of love gone wrong is among the most perverse and unsettling films he made during his two decades of exile in Mexico. Folding his own neuroses into an adaptation of Mercedes Pinto’s autobiographical novel, Buñuel crafts an expressionistically stylized nightmare in which a young woman (Delia Garcés) discovers that the outward sophistication of her new husband (Arturo de Córdova) masks disturbing depths of jealousy and paranoia. A characteristically raw indictment of religious and social hypocrisy, Élstands as the director’s greatest excursion into melodrama, a vivid portrayal of society’s inability to restrain the irrational urges of the human id.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised by photographer Gabriel Figueroa Flores, director of photography Gabriel Figueroa’s son, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New video essay on director Luis Buñuel by scholar Jordi Xifra
- Appreciation by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro
- Interview with Buñuel from 1981 by writer Jean-Claude Carrière, a longtime collaborator of the director’s
- Panel discussion from 2009, moderated by filmmaker José Luis Garci
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by critic Fernanda Solórzano and, in the 4K and Blu-ray, an interview with Buñuel by critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent
Available November 18, 2025
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EYES WIDE SHUT
1999 • 159 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
Stanley Kubrick’s career-capping Eyes Wide Shut unfolds in a dreamscape vision of New York City, where doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), confront the unconscious desires, jealousies, and fears threatening their marriage. A Christmastime odyssey into a surreal sexual underworld whose hidden power structures are laid frighteningly bare, the film marks the fulfillment of the director’s decades-long desire to adapt Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story and the culmination of his obsessive interest in the relationship between institutional authority and the individual. Released in 1999, the film also serves as a fitting coda to a century of cinema, by one of its greatest visionaries—an endlessly tantalizing labyrinth whose myriad symbols, mysteries, and meanings are still being unraveled.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration of the international version of the film, supervised and approved by director of photography Larry Smith, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
- New interviews with Smith, photographer and second-unit director Lisa Leone, and Stanley Kubrick archivist Georgina Orgill
- Archival interview with Christiane Kubrick, director Stanley Kubrick’s wife
- Never Just a Dream (2019), featuring interviews with producer Jan Harlan; Katharina Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick’s daughter; and Anthony Frewin, Kubrick’s personal assistant
- Lost Kubrick: The Unfinished Films of Stanley Kubrick (2007)
- Kubrick Remembered (2014), featuring interviews with actors Todd Field and Leelee Sobieski and filmmaker Steven Spielberg
- Kubrick’s 1998 acceptance speech for the Directors Guild of America’s D. W. Griffith Award
- Press conference from 1999, featuring Harlan and actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman
- Teaser and trailers
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author Megan Abbott and a 1999 interview with filmmaker and actor Sydney Pollack
Available November 18, 2025
Aaron Neuwirth
Writer/Reviewer, Film Lover, Podcaster, Gamer, Comic Reader, Disc Golfer & a Lefty. There are too many films, TV, books, etc. for me to list as favorites, but I can assure that the amount film knowledge within my noggin is ridiculous, though I am always open to learning more. You can follow me on Twitter @AaronsPS4, see what else I am up to at TheCodeIsZeek.com & check out my podcast, Out Now with Aaron and Abe, on iTunes.
