“Resurrection,” directed by Bee Gan, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, will make its streaming debut on Criterion Channel on March 24th. A Criterion premiere home video release is scheduled for April 21st.
The film is the most ambitious project to date from Chinese director Bi Gan, who also directed “A Journey into the Night” and “Kairi Blues,” and centers on a dreaming monster played by Jackson Yee on a shape-shifting adventure spanning 100 years of film history in a world where humans have given up their dreams in exchange for immortality. Split into five chapters, the film straddles silent-era expressionism, film noir, and a vampire love story shot in Gunn’s signature long takes.
Jessica Kiang reviewed the film in Variety, calling it “a stunningly maximalist film of extravagant ambition, actually consisting of five or six films, each at once playful and whimsical, and part of an overall melancholic elegy for the 20th century movie dream and our lives within it.”
“Of course, it’s a paradox to make a film that demands precisely from its audience the spirit of innocent abandon that was created to mourn its disappearance. But every moment of ‘Resurrection’ exists on an axis of paradox, all of which have their origin in a fundamentally paradoxical premise. This is a near future where dreams are movies and movies are dreams (this is probably just a curt assessment of the post-pandemic present) and this is bad news, both because no one dreams anymore,” Kian added.
A clip from a new interview with Bi Gun, part of Criterion’s “Meet the Filmmaker” series, has been published by Variety. In it, Bi Gun talks about his early film influences, from “The Red Balloon” to “Stalker.”
Watch the clip here:
Founded in 1984, The Criterion Collection has built a reputation for publishing high-quality editions of classic and contemporary films in a variety of formats, from laserdisc and DVD to Blu-ray, 4K UHD, and its streaming platform, The Criterion Channel.
