Criterion Collection October 2025 Releases Include ‘A History Of Violence,’ ‘Eyes Without A Face,’ ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ & Much More

Another batch of releases from The Criterion Collection has been announced, as October is going to have quite a lovely batch of films that you can purchase on physical media.

The films on the announced list of titles include an extended director’s cut of Guillermo del Toro‘s grim noir thriller “Nightmare Alley” starring Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett, the highly influential 1960 French psychological horror film “Eyes Without A Face” (helped usher-in visually striking grounded horror/slasher films while the equally artsy Gaillo sub-genre was also coming together in Italy) from Georges Franju, the late David Lynch‘s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” Arturo Ripstein‘s “Deep Crimson,” Ken Russell‘s “Altered States,” along with David Cronenberg‘s recent afterlife sci-fi drama “The Shrouds” and “A History of Violence” (held the record for the last major title released on the VHS format as DVD became the main home video option).

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Here is a breakdown of the latest wave of Criterion releases and when they’ll be coming out.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK FOR ME (October 7):

In the town of Twin Peaks, everybody has their secrets—but no one more than Laura Palmer. In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, following her through the last week of her life and teasing out the enigmas that surround her murder. Homecoming queen by day and drug-addicted thrill seeker by night, Laura leads a double life that pulls her deeper and deeper into horror as she pieces together the identity of the assailant who has been terrorizing her for years. Nightmarish in its vision of an innocent torn apart by unfathomable forces, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is nevertheless one of Lynch’s most humane films, aching with compassion for its tortured heroine, a character as enthralling in life as she was in death.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (October 14):

At his secluded château in the French countryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor (Pierre Brasseur) attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter’s disfigured countenance—at a horrifying price. Eyes Without a Face, directed by the supremely talented Georges Franju, is rare in horror cinema for its odd mixture of the ghastly and the lyrical, and it has been a major influence on the genre in the decades since its release. There are images here—of terror, of gore, of inexplicable beauty—that once seen are never forgotten.

THE SHROUDS (October 21):

Long fascinated by the ways that technology is transforming our bodies and minds, David Cronenberg returns with one of his most profoundly personal films, an audacious, elegiac exploration of grief, mortality, and love wrapped in the guise of a corporate-espionage thriller. Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is the enigmatic entrepreneur behind a new tech package that allows bereaved relatives to view their loved ones’ decomposing remains. When his futuristic cemetery is vandalized, he begins to suspect a conspiracy is at work, forcing him to confront the trauma of—and mystery surrounding—the death of his beloved Becca (Diane Kruger). Conceived in the wake of his own wife’s death, The Shrouds finds Cronenberg exploring heady ideas around sex, surveillance, and the ultimate body horror: the physical decay that awaits us all.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (October 21):

In David Cronenberg’s subtly provocative film, all is not as it seems[ck]. In his first of many collaborations with the director, Viggo Mortensen delivers a highly nuanced performance as Tom Stall, a small-town husband and father who is hailed as a hero when he kills the would-be perpetrators of a violent robbery. But how did this ordinary family man dispatch them with such skill? Working with an exceptional cast that also includes Maria Bello, Ed Harris, and William Hurt, Cronenberg slyly deconstructs the mythos of the American action hero, posing elemental questions about identity, human nature, and the violence that we both abhor and can’t look away from.

ALTERED STATES (October 21):

The ultimate cinematic head trip of the 1980s, British renegade Ken Russell’s first Hollywood film—adapted by the legendary screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky from his own novel—is part hallucinogenic freak-out, part gonzo creature feature, part transcendent love story, all played at a fever pitch. When researcher Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) begins using himself as a test subject for his mind-expanding psychological experiments, it sends him on an increasingly dangerous, substance-fueled odyssey from humankind’s primordial past to the outer limits of consciousness. It’s all visualized by Russell in a psychedelic supernova of out-there imagery that encompasses everything from the pagan to the cosmic sublime, culminating in a brain-wave-blasting battle between the mind and the heart.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY (October 28):

Noir fatalism has rarely been so alluring as in this vision of the world as a soul-sick carnival of corruption. Putting his own luxuriantly stylized spin on the classic hard-boiled novel by William Lindsay Gresham, master fabulist Guillermo del Toro conjures a sordid, seductive portrait of America on the cusp of World War II. The film follows Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a roustabout in a traveling sideshow who uses charm and deception to become a phony mentalist preying on the rich and powerful—but at what cost? Brought to life by an all-star cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, and Rooney Mara, and nominated for four Oscars (including Best Picture), Nightmare Alley is a haunting descent into the illusory abyss of the American dream.

DEEP CRIMSON (October 28):

One of the peaks of subversive Mexican director Arturo Ripstein’s cinema of outsiders, this deliriously perverse portrait of obsessive love dares audiences to see the humanity in the most sordid of antiheroes. A lonely-hearts advertisement leads lusty nurse Coral (Regina Orozco) to Nicolás (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a con man with whom she forges an increasingly intense, twisted bond as they crisscross 1940s Mexico, robbing and murdering the women he seduces. Blending sweeping melodrama with macabre humor and eruptions of berserk violence, Ripstein transforms one of the most infamous true-crime stories of the twentieth century into a haunting vision of how love can give way to madness.

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Below are a bunch of trailers for those upcoming Criterion Collection releases, which should help give moviegoers an idea of what to expect, as this is certainly a mighty fine group of films.