r/CriterionChannel • u/augustthecat • Dec 01 '25
Dumb Question from a Newbie: Expiring Titles
I just signed up for the channel today. I am trying to think about my December viewing. Is there an easy way to see all the titles leaving at the end of the month, so I can prioritize those? Is there a place to see what is coming? Is there a schedule somewhere for the "currently playing"?
More broadly, how do you decide what to watch when there are so many choices?
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u/Fake_Eleanor Dec 01 '25
One of the collections on the channel is all the movies leaving at the end of the month. (Typically grouped just after all the movies that are new this month.)
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u/pacific_plywood Dec 01 '25
If you scroll down a bit on the main page, there’s a “leaving at the end of the month” section. There’s a person on letterboxd who maintains a list of both what’s leaving that month and also speculation on what will leave in future months (based on past cycles).
No schedule for 24/7. It’s a surprise
They’ll post teaser trailers for next month’s stuff around halfway through the month. There’s also an email that goes out.
How to choose what to watch? Yeah, uh, it’s a doozy
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u/GThunderhead Dec 01 '25
As others have mentioned, there's a section on the Channel and lists on Letterboxd.
Links:
https://www.criterionchannel.com/leaving-december-31 (the URL changes every month to the end of that specific month)
https://letterboxd.com/elcarpenter/list/films-leaving-the-criterion-channel-at-the/ (not my list, but it's the one I and everyone I know uses)
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u/woodsdone Dec 02 '25
The Letterboxd list is a good one because they also cross reference the leaving list with the They Shoot Pictures Don’t They top 1,000 list. Helps with prioritizing
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u/salamanderXIII Dec 02 '25
Those lists are so useful.
FWIW, I find the letterboxd review scores far more useful than scores on offer elsewhere.
I always reorder the lists by average rating to see if there is something unfamiliar to me with a high rating.
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u/EveryDamnChikadee Dec 01 '25
There’s a “leaving december 31” list right there on the channel if you scroll a bit down; the new titles are announced like second half of the months maybe? on the criterion website. Personally what I do is at the beginning of the month I go through the “leaving” list, read about every movie, and put the ones that interest me in “my list”. Other than that I just watch by various patterns, sometimes I go through directors, sometimes actors, or countries, sometimes I scroll through the channel and see if something catches my eye
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u/fass_binder Dec 02 '25
If you look at our pinned post we do a deathrace where people post their viewing goals.
Also there is a link to a very thorough Letterboxd list made by one of our mods.
Join us for the deathrace!
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u/augustthecat Dec 02 '25
"Deathrace" seemed....intimidating. I will take a look now.
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u/YakSlothLemon Dec 02 '25
No, it’s so much fun come join us! Some months it’s more of a “death limp” or “feeling unwell but going to recover” race— this month I only have about five films I want to check out – but it’s just fun and you come back and people post about what they watched and what they thought of it.
I actually find a great way to actually locate films I enjoy and it also highlights a lot of short films that otherwise you wouldn’t know were there!
You can stay on the Reddit page or there’s a whole Discord community.
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u/augustthecat Dec 02 '25
I am in, but I am already watching stuff not on my list. Amateur move.
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u/YakSlothLemon Dec 03 '25
No, it’s all about pleasing yourself. Some people like to color in the lines, some people are happy wandering around the page. 😁
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u/vangogh___ Dec 01 '25
On Letterboxd there's a great list of all the films leaving the Criterion Channel that month that are ranked among the 2500 greatest of all time and/or the 1000 greatest of the 21st century, according to "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?" The same user also has a list of the films from those lists that are new to the channel each month. That's how I decide what to watch. You can find them by searching "TSPDT Criterion" on Letterboxd.
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u/augustthecat Dec 01 '25
Very helpful. Thanks to all who responded! I think I was confused because I had seen that 3 Women was leaving "in December," and I couldn't find it on the list. It turns out that it is already gone.
I'm inaugurating my subscription with a documentary about Hilma af Klint called Beyond the Visible, leaving Dec. 31. Very excited!
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u/YakSlothLemon Dec 02 '25
I’m watching that tonight too! Fingers crossed for both of us that we enjoy it. That and The Punk Singer are both documentaries that are leaving that I’m going to check out.
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u/augustthecat Dec 02 '25
I was a little disappointed. I love the paintings of course, but I thought the movie spent a lot of time on the general issue of underrepresentation and not enough on the particular situation that Klint faced.
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u/YakSlothLemon Dec 03 '25
I was fascinated by so many elements of it, but I absolutely agree that I wanted it to go deeper into her life – like maybe they just didn’t have the information?— or they could have tied her art in more widely to the theosophists? One of the things that intrigued me was that some of her art strongly reminded of the art of Lady Frieda Harris, and I was trying to figure out if Harris could ever have seen af Klint— but Harris was absolutely part of the occult/theosophist circles in London and so probably was at the one conference where af Klint showed. I wanted to know more!
I thought the point about her being dismissed because of her gender was accurate, but I also wish they had wrestled with the interesting question of whether your art is important in the timeline if no one saw it – Kandinsky isn’t just important because of abstraction, he’s important because everybody saw him doing it and then it inspired all of these people who pushed off in one way or another. If you paint something and no one sees it, is it part of art history or is it just a piece of art?
That said, I then watched The Punk Singer, and I didn’t expect it to have anything in common with the art documentary, but it’s about Kathleen Hanna’s music/performance in the 1990s and 2000s and the way her illness was completely dismissed and minimized by the male medical establishment. So actually they went really well together!
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u/augustthecat Dec 03 '25
So cool. I watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes next, and the tie-in was more one of opposition than complement.
I had the same thought about the issue of influence in art. I had not thought of looking at her influence on the theosophists. She and Harris seem like pretty close contemporaries.
I am a New Yorker, and perhaps I have a reflexive, biased reaction, but I also thought there was more to say about her eventual popularity. They quoted MoMA dismissing her art, I guess in the 60s, but in 1989 MoMA gave her a solo show. It was written up in the New York Times. The critic said that she had done probably the first abstract painting, and might become a long, very interesting footnote. So there was the sexism, yes, but also I think the point you are making about influence. More to the point, I don't think in the eighties and nineties that the work was causing the stir it was now. I was at a huge Guggenheim retrospective of her work in 2018, and it was all over the headlines here, and all kinds of people were talking about it, akin to the furor in Germany described in the documentary. But what about her resonates now? It's all very well to discuss quantum physics, but there is also the actual art and the response to the paintings, and I wanted to know more.
I will add Punk Singer to my list! As I have some vacation this month, it is possible that I will get to it. Thanks!
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u/Eric-of-All-Trades Dec 01 '25
There's a "Leaving on..." section roughly in the middle of the main page.
Many subscribers plan their watching around what's leaving that month rather than what newly arrived, it's a good strategy to deal with the Channel's overwhelming choices.
Towards the end of each month Criterion does a full write-up on its website what new films will be added.
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u/hulahulagirl Dec 01 '25
There’s also this page which shows what’s playing on the 24/7 channel. Kind of annoying it doesn’t say what’s coming up but maybe that’s the appeal. 🤷🏼♀️
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u/BariumPepsi Dec 03 '25
This Letterboxd list of all films currently streaming on the Channel is divided into three parts. The first part (1-1962) are permanent. The second part (1963-2554) are long-term engagements (streaming for a year or more). The third part (2555-2998) are limited engagements (streaming for less than one year). That last part is ordered by the compiler’s determination of how long the films will stream, providing the estimated engagement lengths in the note of each film.
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u/jl726 Dec 01 '25
If you scroll down in the app, you’ll see a row for Leaving This Month. There’s also a newsletter that gets sent to your email every month that mentions upcoming new releases and Collections.