Criterion’s January 2026 Lineup: ‘Birth,’ ‘Kiss Of The Spider Woman, ‘Yi Yi,’ ‘Caught By The Tides,’ ‘The Dead’ & More

The Criterion Collection has announced today a wave of tantalizing movies they’ll be releasing on physical media, another mixture of classic, modern, and international gems. Those titles kicking off the new year include Jim Jarmusch‘s “Dead Man,” Edward Yang‘s “Yi Yi,” John Huston‘s “The Dead,” “Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 5” (the grouping of international movies features “Chronicle of The Years of Fire,” “Yam Daabo,” “Kummatty,” and “The Fall of Otrar“), Michael Curtiz‘s “Captain Blood” with Errol Flynn playing the iconic Irish doctor turned pirate, Jonathan Glazer‘s “Birth,” Héctor Babenco‘s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and Jia Zhangke‘s “Caught By The Tides.”

Below is a rundown of those films, their trailers, alongside when to expect they’ll be sent out to buyers, aka, street dates.

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DEAD MAN (1995) – COMING JANUARY 6: With “Dead Man,” his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country’s legacy of violence and prejudice, and the natural cycle of life and death. Accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) has hardly arrived in the godforsaken outpost of Machine before he’s caught in the middle of a fatal lovers’ quarrel. Wounded and on the lam, Blake falls under the watch of the outcast Nobody (Gary Farmer), who guides his companion on a spiritual journey, teaching him to dispense poetic justice along the way. Featuring austerely beautiful black-and-white photography by Robby Müller and a live-wire score by Neil Young, Dead Man is a profound and unique revision of the western genre.

YI YI (2000) – COMING JANUARY 13: The extraordinary, internationally embraced “Yi Yi,” directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-aged father NJ’s tentative flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, the filmmaker deftly imbues every gorgeous frame with a compassionate clarity. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the twenty-first century.

THE DEAD (1987) – COMING JANUARY 20: The elegiac last film by John Huston finds the legendary director adapting a masterly short story by his favorite writer, James Joyce, into a poignant reflection on the totality of life. During a snowy winter in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Dublin, the members of an extended family convene for a night of wine, song, and celebration—but it’s not until after the festivities that Gretta (Anjelica Huston) reveals a secret to her husband (Donal McCann) that casts the entire evening in a new light. Aglow with a mix of nostalgia and melancholy, and featuring a cast of stellar Irish actors, “The Dead” gracefully evokes the passage of time and the haunting power of memory.

CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935) – COMING JANUARY 20: With this spectacular romantic adventure, a new era of Hollywood swashbuckling was born, as was a devilishly dashing star named Errol Flynn. He brings boundless charisma to the role of an idealistic Irish physician who, declared a traitor to England and sold into slavery in the New World, takes his revenge by transforming himself into the notorious pirate Captain Blood. The groundbreaking symphonic score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, marking the emergence of the Warner Bros. music department as a vital element in the studio’s moviemaking; the spitfire chemistry between Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in the first of their iconic pairings; the rousing naval-battle finale—all come together under the expert direction of Michael Curtiz to form an exemplar of classic film craftsmanship sailing full speed ahead.

MARTIN SCORSESE’S WORLD CINEMA PROJECT NO. 5 – COMING JANUARY 20: Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, the “World Cinema Project” has maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of more than sixty restorations of works by essential filmmakers. This collector’s set gathers four groundbreaking and innovative films, ranging from the epic to the intimate, from Algeria (“Chronicle of the Years of Fire”), Burkina Faso (“Yam Daabo”), India (“Kummatty”), and Kazakhstan (“The Fall of Otrar”). 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.

*CHRONICLE OF THE YEARS OF FIRE (1975): Burning with passion, poetry, and a nation’s fervent spirit of resistance, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s stirring revolutionary epic vividly dramatizes the pivotal decades leading up to Algeria’s War of Independence through the harrowing saga of Ahmed (Yorgo Voyagis), a proud farmer seeking a dignified life, whose experience of brutal oppression and systemic injustice leads him, like so many others, to take a stand against the seemingly indomitable might of French colonialism. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, this awe-inspiring landmark of Arab cinema is an at once personal and expansive vision of a country awakening from despair to build an unbreakable movement of liberation.

*YAM DABBO (1986): A family’s quest for self-determination mirrors a nation’s struggle in the sensitively observed feature debut by titan of Burkinabe cinema Idrissa Ouédraogo, who cast an ennobling gaze on ordinary Africans navigating the upheavals of the postcolonial era. Made amid revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara’s push to create a self-reliant Burkina Faso, Yam Daabo follows an impoverished family as they leave behind a life in the city reliant on Western aid to start anew in the more verdant countryside, quietly capturing the rhythms of everyday life as well as its devastating tragedies and intimate joys. Featuring music by the legendary Francis Bebey, Yam Daabo imbues an elemental human story with profound political weight.

*KUMMATTY (1979): Beautifully photographed amid the lush pastoral landscapes of southern India’s Kerala region, this enchanting child’s-eye fable conjures a folkloric world in which the magical exists side by side with the everyday. When Kummatty, a kind of shamanic bogeyman, arrives in a small village, he captivates the children with his music and colorful masks—until he casts a spell that has unexpected consequences for one boy. Bursting with exuberant songs and children’s chants, this fantasy from G. Aravindan, a pioneer of India’s art-house “parallel cinema” movement, is a treasure of imagination and entrancing visual lyricism.

*THE FALL OF OTRAR (1991): Kazakh New Wave iconoclast Ardak Amirkulov’s hypnotic thirteenth-century epic is a feverish vision of one of history’s most decisive battles—Genghis Khan’s siege of the now-lost city of Otrar—engraved in images of stunning, hallucinatory power. When his warnings about an imminent invasion are taken for insolence, a former Mongol scout (Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev) must escape imprisonment to stop an escalating diplomatic crisis and avert a clash of civilizations. With a panoramic scope that encompasses intimate palace intrigue and the merciless sweep of battlefield carnage, The Fall of Otrar is a monumental imagining of seismic historical upheaval—and a terrifying, electrifying feast for the senses.

CAUGHT BY THE TIDES (2024) – COMING JANUARY 20: In this visionary chronicle of China’s turbulent new century, acclaimed director Jia Zhangke embarks on a kaleidoscopic odyssey across time and space, incorporating footage captured for his previous films into an entirely original, captivating epic. Drawing on a twenty-three-year collaboration between Jia and actors Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin, Caught by the Tides casts them as a pair of estranged lovers, tracking these characters across an increasingly alien China as they age in real time, from the dawn of the millennium to the COVID-19 era. Observing the future-shock developments transforming his country, Jia constructs a sensorially immersive, emotionally profound portrait of both a world in flux and two people navigating its uncertain currents.

BIRTH (2004) – COMING JANUARY 27: Jonathan Glazer’s second feature is a haunting cinematic enigma that explores the mysteries of the heart. Nicole Kidman delivers a masterfully multilayered performance as Anna, a widow still mourning the death of her husband a decade earlier, when she meets Sean (Cameron Bright), a ten-year-old boy who claims to be his reincarnation—leading her into a wrenching confrontation with her own unresolved grief and desires. Featuring painterly cinematography by Harris Savides and a hypnotic orchestral score by Alexandre Desplat, Birth plays its outré premise with unflinching sincerity, yielding a profound emotional reverie on the possibilities of love beyond the physical realm.

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (1985) – COMING JANUARY 27: Featuring indelible performances from Raul Julia and an Academy Award–winning William Hurt, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a work of radical compassion that boldly expands notions of love, gender, and revolution. In the film—directed by Héctor Babenco following his international breakthrough with Pixote, and adapted from the novel by the iconoclastic writer Manuel Puig—Julia and Hurt play Valentin and Molina, a militant leftist activist and a queer, cinema-obsessed window dresser, imprisoned together under a repressive military dictatorship. The two gradually forge a bond that transforms the way they both understand politics, sexuality, and masculinity. Blending raw realism with Molina’s imaginative escapes into sumptuous movie fantasy, this searing human drama offers a powerful vision of personal liberation embedded within broader political struggle.

Another impressive round-up of cinematic landmarks, as The Criterion Collection has established itself as one of the best destinations for cinephiles looking to add to growing media collections, or simply seeking out slightly more obscure features that most simply can’t find anywhere else locally or online.