The Criterion Collection has announced seven new titles to join the collection on 4K UHD and Blu-Ray in November: The Breakfast Club (1985), House Party (1990), Burden of Dreams (1982), Eclipse Series 47: Abbas Kiarostami—Early Shorts and Features (1970-1989), Hell’s Angels (1930), Él (1953), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). These represent an era-defining pop-culture phenomenon from John Hughes, a feel-good comedy snapshot of 1990s hip-hop culture, an extraordinary document of a fearless director, a selection of early works from a legend of world cinema, a high-flying feat of adventure filmmaking, a warped tale of wayward love from surrealist master Luis Buñuel, and a tantalizing labyrinth crafted by Stanley Kubrick. Details on these films can be found below:
The Breakfast Club (4K UHD Blu-Ray)
Street Date: November 4, 2025
Synopsis: 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
House Party (4K UHD & Blu-Ray)
Street Date: November 11, 2025
Synopsis: 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 4K UHD + BLU-RAY 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
- 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
Burden of Dreams (4K UHD & Blu-Ray)
Street Date: November 11, 2025
Synopsis: For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films 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 Peruvians 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.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY 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
- 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 a book of excerpts from Blank’s and Gosling’s production journals
Eclipse Series 47: Abbas Kiarostami—Early Shorts and Features (Blu-Ray)
Street Date: November 18, 2025
Synopsis: 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.
This release features 2K restorations undertaken by MK2 in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata.
Films In This Set
Bread and Alley
“The mother of all my films,” according to Abbas Kiarostami, starts out as a breezily observed anecdote about a boy wending his way home through Tehran alleys carrying a loaf of bread. Variations on both the boy and the old man he sees and begins to follow will factor into future Kiarostami films, as will the use of “dead time,” the journey structure, and the poetic articulation of space. The final scene, involving a dog and a door, ends things on a note of wry ambiguity.
Breaktime
Disciplined at school for breaking a window, a boy joins throngs of his schoolmates as they make a cacophonous exit into Tehran’s streets. He then briefly joins an impromptu soccer game but disrupts it by stealing the ball and running away, and ends up drifting aimlessly along a busy highway. Free of dialogue but using nonsynchronous concrete sound throughout, this moody film shows Abbas Kiarostami expanding his visual vocabulary with zooms and crane and helicopter shots.
Experience
Based on a story by Amir Naderi, who also cowrote the film, this slice of a fourteen-year-old boy’s life follows his efforts to fend for himself in the big city, working as a tea server and assistant in a photographer’s studio, running errands, and, briefly, exchanging glances with a pretty middle-class girl. With no music and little dialogue, and distinguished by its darkly elegant compositions, the film offers an impressionistic meditation on adolescent solitude.
The Traveler
Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature focuses on a boy in a provincial city so avid to get to Tehran to see a soccer match that he’ll lie to adults and cheat other kids. A quest film that’s also a study of youthful obsession, it’s filmed in edgy black and white with a quiet energy that matches its hero’s. The Traveler has an acridly ironic ending and one of the best performances by a child in Kiarostami’s early work.
Two Solutions for One Problem
This simple moral tale seems to prefigure Where Is the Friend’s House? Two young schoolboys, Dara and Nader, are friends until Dara returns Nader’s notebook torn and Nader retaliates in kind, setting off an escalating battle that leads to destruction of property and physical injury. In the second solution, Dara realizes his offense and repairs the notebook, preserving the peace and the friendship. The film is shot mostly in close-ups, with a narrator drolly chronicling the action.
So Can I
The first of Abbas Kiarostami’s films made for, rather than about, children was an experiment in combining live action and animation, done in collaboration with animator Nafiseh Riahi. As two schoolboys watch animated views of animals’ actions—kangaroos jumping, fish swimming, etc.—one boy (played by Riahi’s son Kamal) says, “I can, too,” and imitates the actions. The music is sprightly, the mood fun. The second boy is Kiarostami’s son Ahmad.
Colors
Ostensibly a film for children, this picture-book essay about the range of hues that brighten our world has the air of a delightfully playful formalistic exercise. As a narrator runs though the colors one by one, Abbas Kiarostami shows us where each appears in nature and human life (which occasions some great views of prerevolutionary consumer culture in Iran). Of course, a little boy is featured—in one memorable sequence, he fantasizes about being a race-car driver.
A Wedding Suit
In a trilevel shopping arcade, a teenage boy who works for a tailor is besieged by two other boys who want to borrow a new suit to wear on a social outing before it’s turned over to its owner. One of the most accomplished and intricately plotted of Abbas Kiarostami’s Kanoon films, this sharply observed drama contains suspense, satire, an undercurrent of violence, and even a magic show.
Tribute to Teachers
An assignment from Iran’s Ministry of Education, this documentary from the last years of the Pahlavi dynasty includes interviews with officials who predictably praise teaching as a sacred, noble, and honorable profession. The teachers who are also interviewed are less starry-eyed; one speaks of ungrateful students and the job’s poor pay. The contrasting views express Abbas Kiarostami’s interest in education while registering some of his reservations about how it is practiced.
Solution No. 1
The rare Kanoon film that doesn’t involve children, this unusual road movie was made during the revolution and afforded Abbas Kiarostami what may have been a welcome escape from the capital. Shot amid spectacular mountain scenery north of Tehran, it shows a young man on a roadside with a tire, trying to get a ride. After several minutes of failure, he simply takes the tire and rolls it down the mountain, a lyrical visual journey that’s accompanied by a triumphal score.
First Case, Second Case
Made in the spring of 1979, not long after the shah’s overthrow, this extraordinary film serves as a Rorschach blot for people in a revolutionary mindset. Abbas Kiarostami stages two versions of a classroom-discipline situation—in one, a student tells on a troublemaker; in the other, seven students refuse to rat—and then has several adult authorities comment on the outcomes. The fascinating responses evoke conflicts between order and resistance.
Toothache
Though much of this film by Abbas Kiarostami is a straightforward lecture about dental hygiene delivered by a dentist facing the camera, it still manages to be persuasively Kiarostami-esque in its description of young Mohammad-Reza’s life at home and school before he falls prey to tooth woes. (Kiarostami found the boy having a tooth removed, then filmed the earlier parts of the story later.) That some audiences find the film hilarious testifies to the humor that can accompany great discomfort.
Orderly or Disorderly
The first shot shows students descending a staircase in calm, orderly fashion, then the second details the same action as a chaotic rush. Separated by slates and director Abbas Kiarostami’s voice intoning, “Sound, camera,” subsequent sequences describe the same dichotomous behavior in a schoolyard, on a school bus, and in the haphazard traffic of Tehran. Kiarostami described this as “a truly educational film,” but it plays more like a quirky philosophic aside.
The Chorus
An old man strolls through the noisy streets of Rasht, and when his hearing aid is knocked out of his ear, the film’s sound goes off, mimicking the silence that envelops him. At home, the same thing happens when he takes the device out, and Abbas Kiarostami intercuts his silent actions with the clamor of schoolgirls who try to get his attention from outside. Another Kiarostami meditation on the contrasts of silence and sound, age and youth, solitude and solidarity.
Fellow Citizen
Abbas Kiarostami’s fascination with both Tehrani car culture and the uses of power in postrevolutionary society combine in this documentary about a traffic officer assigned to enforce driving restrictions in central Tehran (a locale near the director’s office at Kanoon). The officer, a rock star in his own world, remains coolly authoritative as he faces a steady stream of exasperated motorists.
First Graders
Inspired by his work at Kanoon and his own sons’ schooling, the first of Abbas Kiarostami’s two documentary features about education looks in on a schoolyard of chanting, playful boys but mainly transpires in the office of a supervisor who has to deal with latecomers and discipline problems. You can almost see the boys’ personalities forming in their first encounters with authorities and peers outside the home.
Homework
In Abbas Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, probing a succession of invariably cute first- and second-graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there. It emerges that many parents are illiterate. Tellingly, many kids can define punishment (the corporal variety seems common) but not encouragement.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- An essay by critic Ehsan Khoshbakht
Hell’s Angels (4K UHD & Blu-Ray)
Street Date: November 18, 2025
Synopsis: 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.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration of the Magnascope road-show version, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- 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
Él (4K UHD & Blu-Ray)
Street Date: November 18, 2025
Synopsis: 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, Él stands as the director’s greatest excursion into melodrama, a vivid portrayal of society’s inability to restrain the irrational urges of the human id.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised by photographer Gabriel Figueroa Flores, director of photography Gabriel Figueroa’s son, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- 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 an interview with Buñuel by critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent
Eyes Wide Shut (4K UHD & Blu-Ray)
Street Date: November 25, 2025
Synopsis: 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.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURE
- 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
- 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 actor Sydney Pollack
Dillon is most comfortable sitting around in a theatre all day watching both big budget and independent movies.
