February and Valentine’s Day go hand in hand, and The Criterion Collection embraces this with its February 2025 lineup, featuring films exploring themes of love—both found and lost. The releases include a mix of domestic and international hits, with selections spanning recent decades and classic cinema. Represented filmmakers include Paul Thomas Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, Gus Van Sant, and Jean-Luc Godard, offering a diverse array of cinematic voices to celebrate the complexities of love.
Punch-Drunk Love (directed by Paul Thomas Anderson)
From The Criterion Collection: Chaos lurks in every corner of this giddily off-kilter foray into romantic comedy by Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Licorice Pizza). Struggling to cope with his erratic temper, novelty-toilet-plunger salesman Barry Egan (Adam Sandler, demonstrating remarkable versatility in his first dramatic role, leading to future performances in films like Uncut Gems and Spaceman) spends his days collecting frequent-flier-mile coupons and dodging the insults of his seven sisters. The promise of a new life emerges when Barry inadvertently attracts the affection of a mysterious woman named Lena (Emily Watson), but their budding relationship is threatened when he falls prey to the swindling operator of a phone sex line and her deranged boss (played with maniacal brio by Philip Seymour Hoffman). Fueled by the careening momentum of a baroque-futurist score by Jon Brion, the Cannes-award-winning Punch-Drunk Love channels the spirit of classic Hollywood and the whimsy of Jacques Tati into an idiosyncratic ode to the delirium of new romance.
The 4k edition of Punch-Drunk Love releases February 4, 2025 from The Criterion Collection and can be pre-ordered here.
King Lear (directed by Jean-Luc Godard)
From The Criterion Collection: Jean-Luc Godard’s first English-language narrative feature is a radical anti-adaptation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece that finds the visionary filmmaker continuing to reinvent the syntax of cinema. In a post-Chernobyl world where culture has been lost, William Shakespeare Jr. V (played by theater director Peter Sellars) attempts to reconstruct his ancestor’s play, abetted by a cast that includes Molly Ringwald, Burgess Meredith, and Godard himself as a crazed avant savant. Through a dense layering of sounds, images, and ideas about everything from language to the economics of filmmaking to the very meaning of art in a ruined world, Godard fashions a puckish and profound metacinematic riddle to be endlessly analyzed, argued over, and savored.
The Blu-ray edition of King Lear releases February 11, 2025 from The Criterion Collection and can be pre-ordered here.
Crossing Delancey (directed by Joan Micklin Silver)
From The Criterion Collection: Joan Micklin Silver’s wonderfully affectionate spin on the romantic comedy infuses the genre with a fresh, personal perspective, following an unmarried Jewish woman’s search for fulfillment in New York City. Happily independent bookstore manager Izzy (a luminous Amy Irving) isn’t looking for love, but she’s forced to reevaluate her desires when she catches the eye of two very different men: a self-centered novelist (Jeroen Krabbé) and the mild-mannered Lower East Side pickle seller (Peter Riegert) with whom her old-fashioned bubbie (scene-stealing Yiddish-theater star Reizl Bozyk) sets her up. A love letter to 1980s Manhattan shot in beautifully burnished, autumnal tones, Crossing Delancey gracefully captures the magic of a city where disparate cultures, generations, and traditions both clash and connect.
The 4k edition of Crossing Delancey releases February 18, 2025 from The Criterion Collection and can be pre-ordered here.
Drugstore Cowboy (directed by Gus Van Sant)
From The Criterion Collection: Gus Van Sant’s dreamy, drifty, deadpan second feature—an addiction drama based on James Fogle’s autobiographical novel—captures the zonked-out textures and almost surreal absurdity of a life lived fix to fix. Swinging between dope-fueled disconnection and edgy paranoia, Matt Dillon (The House That Jack Built, Asteroid City) plays the leader of a ragtag crew (also featuring Kelly Lynch, Heather Graham, and James Le Gros) that robs pharmacies for pills, coasting across the 1970s Pacific Northwest while trying to outrun sobriety and fate. With a brilliant supporting turn from counterculture high priest William S. Burroughs and a lyrical feeling for the streetscapes of Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, Drugstore Cowboy cemented the director’s status as a preeminent poet of outsiderhood.
The 4k edition of Drugstore Cowboy releases February 18, 2025 from The Criterion Collection and can be pre-ordered here.
Performance (directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg)
From The Criterion Collection: The grimy criminal underworld and hedonistic rock-and-roll counterculture of late-1960s London collide in this mind-scrambling, kaleidoscopic freak-out. On the run from his vengeful boss, a ruthless gangster (James Fox) hides out in the Notting Hill home of a reclusive rock star (Mick Jagger) and his companions (Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton), who open the doors of his perception as the lines between reality and fantasy, male and female, persona and self, dissolve in a hallucinogenic haze. Built around Jagger’s most magnetic narrative-film performance, this visionary collaboration between enigmatic artist Donald Cammell and first-time director Nicolas Roeg is a daringly transgressive, endlessly influential journey to the dark side of bohemia.
The 4k edition of Performance releases February 25, 2025 from The Criterion Collection and can be pre-ordered here.
Cronos (directed by Guillermo del Toro)
From The Criterion Collection: Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley, Pinocchio) made an auspicious and audacious feature debut with Cronos, a highly unorthodox tale about the seductiveness of the idea of immortality. Kindly antiques dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) happens upon an ancient golden device in the shape of a scarab, and soon finds himself the possessor and victim of its sinister, addictive powers, as well as the target of a mysterious American named Angel (a delightfully crude and deranged Ron Perlman). Featuring marvelous makeup effects and the haunting imagery for which del Toro has become world-renowned, Cronos is a dark, visually rich, and emotionally captivating fantasy.
The 4k edition of Cronos releases February 25, 2025 from The Criterion Collection and can be pre-ordered here.
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