The Criterion Collection November Releases Include ‘Eyes Wide Shut,’ ‘House Party, ‘The Breakfast Club’ & More

It’s that time of the month as the fine folks over at The Criterion Collection have announced their lineup of upcoming releases in November, as those titles will include “Eyes Wide Shut,” “House Party,” “The Breakfast Club,” “Él,” “Hell’s Angels,” Werner Herzog‘s “Burden of Dreams,” and “Abbas Kiarostami: Early Shorts & Features.”

Stanley Kubrick‘s final feature film, the NYC-set thriller “Eyes Wide Shut” (which took a record-breaking 400 days to complete filming), starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (their last project together before their divorce). The movie, at its initial release back in 1999, saw mixed reactions from audiences and was harshly compared to Kubrick’s previous films, but it has gained a bit of renewed interest as folks have gone back to complete their watchlists or eventually gave the film a second chance.

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Reginald Hudlin‘s “House Party” and John Hughes‘ “The Breakfast Club” were seminal coming-of-age comedies exploring the experiences of high school-aged teenagers, with the former showcasing the fantasy of throwing an epic party and the latter taking more dramatic turns as a group of kids from different economic backgrounds over a weekend detention eventually realize they can relate to each other beyond their cliques and labels in school as they share stories of their troubled relationships with their parents.

Here is a breakdown of the November titles and when they’ll be available.

THE BREAKFAST (1985) NOVEMBER 4: 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.

BURDERN OF DREAMS (1982) NOVEMBER 11: 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.

HOUSE PARTY (1990) NOVEMBER 11: 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.

HELL’S ANGELS (1930) NOVEMBER 18: 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.

ÉL (1953) NOVEMBER 18: 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.

ECLIPSE SERIES 47: ABBAS KIAROSTAMI – EARLY SHORTS & FEATURES (1970-1989) NOVEMBER 18:

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.

EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) NOVEMBER 25: 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. 

Feel free to check out the trailers for those upcoming releases at The Criterion Collection below.