Criterion’s December slate ranges from avant-garde treasures and screwball-speed classics to a restored Powell & Pressburger romance, a beloved cult comedy, and Spike Lee’s ecstatic concert film. Below is everything coming in December 2025, organized by street date, with official descriptions and purchase details sourced from Criterion.
Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray (directed by Man Ray)
From The Criterion Collection: The swirling surrealist dreams of Man Ray are high-water marks of 1920s avant-garde cinema, a nexus of cryptic themes, dark eroticism, and playful abstraction. Seemingly plucked from an unconscious realm, these four shorts—Le retour à la raison, Emak bakia, L’étoile de mer, and Les mystères du château du dé—find the visionary artist experimenting with the limitless possibilities of montage, superimposition, distortion, and even the application of objects directly onto celluloid. Set here to an ethereal score by the Jim Jarmusch–Carter Logan collaboration SQÜRL, these cine-poems are optical carnival rides that surprise, delight, and unsettle with each tantalizing frame.
Release date & formats: Available December 2, 2025 on Blu-ray. Pre-order here.
His Girl Friday (directed by Howard Hawks)
From The Criterion Collection: One of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made, His Girl Friday stars Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson, a standout among cinema’s powerful women. Hildy is matched in force only by her conniving but charismatic editor and ex-husband Walter Burns (played by the peerless Cary Grant), who dangles the chance for her to scoop her fellow news writers with the story of an impending execution in order to keep her from hopping the train that’s supposed to take her to Albany and a new life as a housewife. When adapting Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s smash-hit play The Front Page, director Howard Hawks had the inspired idea of turning star reporter Hildy Johnson into a woman, and the result is an immortal mix of hard-boiled newsroom setting with ebullient remarriage comedy. Also presented here is a restoration of the 1931 film The Front Page, Lewis Milestone’s famous pre-Code adaptation of the same material.
Release date & formats: Available December 2, 2025 on 4K UHD + Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD. Pre-order here.
Salaam Bombay! (directed by Mira Nair)
From The Criterion Collection: A kaleidoscopic portrait of Bombay’s teeming street life, Mira Nair’s first narrative feature, Salaam Bombay!, combines a documentary-like sense of place with a poignant exploration of everyday resilience. After the young Krishna (Shafiq Syed) is cast out by his family, he makes his way to the city, where he encounters love, friendship, and tragedy in the face of extreme poverty. Drawing compellingly naturalistic performances from a cast consisting largely of children she met on the streets, Nair creates an intimate human drama that is by turns heartbreaking and life-affirming, an ode to childhood that overflows with colorful urban chaos and a deep compassion for those who live on society’s margins.
Release date & formats: Available December 9, 2025 on 4K UHD + Blu-ray (director-approved) and Blu-ray. Pre-order here.
I Know Where I’m Going! (directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
From The Criterion Collection: Love flourishes in the Scottish Hebrides in this windswept enchantment from British cinema’s most passionate visionaries, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. “I know where I’m going!” declares headstrong, upwardly mobile Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) en route to her marriage to a wealthy industrialist—until her carefully laid plans are blown away by a raging storm that leaves her stranded on an island off the Scottish coast with a dashing naval officer (Roger Livesey). Shot in ethereal black and white that enhances the almost mystical air of its setting—a folkloric world where legends and curses still hold sway—this beloved romance is one of cinema’s most stirring expressions of the eternal conflict between the head and the heart.
Release date & formats: Available December 9, 2025 on 4K UHD + Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD. Pre-order here.
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (directed by Tim Burton)
From The Criterion Collection: One of the most eccentric comedies of the 1980s, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is a pop-culture touchstone that helped make a manic oddball named Pee-wee Herman—the creation and alter ego of actor-comedian Paul Reubens—into an icon for outsiders of all ages. It also established the distinctive style of director Tim Burton, whose eye-popping visual sense is already on full display in this, his first feature film. Following the gleefully irreverent Pee-wee as he embarks on a road trip to recover his beloved stolen bicycle, the movie unfolds with the antic invention of a live-action cartoon, combining a gallery of memorably wacky characters, colorful, kitschy Americana, and surreal flights of fancy into a joyously uninhibited paean to creativity and the spirit of childhood.
Release date & formats: Available December 16, 2025 on 4K UHD + Blu-ray (director-approved) and Blu-ray. Pre-order here.
David Byrne’s American Utopia (directed by Spike Lee)
From The Criterion Collection: David Byrne meets America’s fractious political moment with the transcendent power of song in this ecstatic documentary of the Broadway adaptation of his acclaimed American Utopia tour. Captured with immersive immediacy by director Spike Lee, this uplifting spectacle interweaves twenty-one songs, both new and classic, with Byrne’s singular observations on the state of the nation—its perils, promises, and possibility for transformation. Choreographed by Annie-B Parson with the inventive minimalism that has become a signature of Byrne’s live performances, David Byrne’s American Utopia moves between moments of communal exuberance and hymnlike grace, making the case for music as an agent of protest, change, and above all unity.
Release date & formats: Available December 16, 2025 on 4K UHD + Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD. Pre-order here.
