Spirit Entertainment has announced that the Criterion Collection UK releases for May 2025 will be Julian Schnabel’s directorial debut Basquiat, Mizoguchi Kenji's ghost story masterpiece Ugetsu (aka Ugetsu monogatari), and Sean Baker's Oscar-nominated Anora, which was first announced earlier this month.
BASQUIAT (USA 1996)
4K UHD | Blu-ray | 12 May 2025
Julian Schnabel’s tribute to his friend and fellow painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is less a conventional biopic than an impressionistic, sensory immersion into the much-mythologized downtown-Manhattan art world of the 1980s. Jeffrey Wright, in his first lead film role, stars as the visionary artist whose rise from graffiti tagger to art star forces him to confront the glare of sudden fame, along with racism, his own struggles with addiction, and the difficulties of being self-determining and free in America.
Bolstered by an ensemble cast that includes a sublime performance by David Bowie channelling Andy Warhol, Schnabel’s directorial debut—presented here in the filmmaker’s own luminous black-and-white remastering—is a profoundly expressive elegy for a radiant life cut short.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD & BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration of the 2024 black-and-white version of the film, supervised and approved by director Julian Schnabel, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- [UHD ONLY] One 4K UHD disc of the 2024 black-and-white version presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray
with the film and special features
- Audio commentary featuring Schnabel and writer and curator Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan
- New 4K digital restoration of the 1996 theatrical version
- New interview with actor Jeffrey Wright
- Interview from 1996 with Schnabel and actor David Bowie
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Roger Durling
- New cover by Julian Schnabel
UGETSU [Ugetsu monogatari] (Japan 1953)
4K UHD | Blu-ray | 19 May 2025
By the time he made Ugetsu, Mizoguchi Kenji was already an elder statesman of Japanese cinema, fiercely revered by Kurosawa Akira and other directors of a younger generation. And with this exquisite ghost story, a fatalistic wartime tragedy derived from stories by Ueda Akinari and Guy de Maupassant, he created a touchstone of his art, his long takes and sweeping camera guiding the viewer through a delirious narrative about two villagers whose pursuit of fame and fortune leads them far astray from their loyal wives.
Moving between the terrestrial and the otherworldly, Ugetsu reveals essential truths about the ravages of war, the plight of women, and the pride of men. Ugetsu was restored by The Film Foundation and Kadokawa Corporation at Cineric Laboratories in New York. Special thanks to Masahiro Miyajima and Martin Scorsese for their consultation on this restoration. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in association with The Film Foundation and Kadokawa Corporation.
4K UHD & BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- [UHD ONLY] One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary by critic, filmmaker, and festival programmer Tony Rayns
- Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director, a 1975 documentary by Shindo Kaneto
- Two Worlds Intertwined, a 2005 appreciation of Ugetsu by Shinoda Masahiro
- Process and Production, a 2005 interview with Tanaka Tokuzo, first assistant director on Ugetsu
- Interview from 1992 with cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo
- Trailers
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Phillip Lopate and three short stories that inspired the film
- Cover by Michael Boland
ANORA (USA 2024)
4K UHD | Blu-ray | 5 May 2025
Contemporary cinema’s foremost chronicler of American dreamers and schemers hustling on the margins of capitalist promise, Sean Baker, reaches new heights of mastery with this audacious anti–Cinderella story—a whirlwind neorealist screwball comedy with an aching heart. In an electric, star-is-born performance, Mikey Madison soars as Anora, an enterprising, ferociously foulmouthed Brooklyn erotic dancer and sex worker whose Prince Not-So-Charming comes along in the form of a Russian oligarch’s wild-child son (Mark Eydelshteyn).
This is the beginning of a fractured fairy tale—also featuring standout performances from Karren Karagulian, Yura Borisov, and Vache Tovmasyan—that turns the cruel realities of class inside out. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, nominated for six Academy Awards® including Best Picture and winner of two BAFTA Awards including Mikey Madison for Leading Actress, Anora confirms Baker as one of our preeminent auteurs.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD & BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital master, supervised by director Sean Baker and producer Alex Coco, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- [UHD ONLY] One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Two audio commentaries: one featuring Baker, Coco, producer Samantha Quan, and cinematographer Drew Daniels, and the other featuring Baker and actors Yura Borisov, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian, Mikey Madison, and Vache Tovmasyan
- New making-of documentary
- New interviews with Baker and Madison
- Cannes Film Festival press conference
- Q&A with Madison and actor-stripper Lindsey Normington
- Deleted scenes
- Trailers
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio
- PLUS: Essays by film critic Dennis Lim and author Kier-La Janisse
- New cover by Bianca Parkes and GrandSon, with photography by Max Abadian
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