Bi Gan‘s “Resurrection,” winner of the Jury Special Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, will make its streaming debut on the Criterion Channel on March 24. A Criterion Premieres home-video release will follow on April 21.
The film – the most ambitious project yet from Bi Gan, the Chinese filmmaker behind “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “Kaili Blues” – centers on a dreaming monster played by Jackson Yee, who undertakes a shape-shifting odyssey across a century of cinema history in a world where humans have surrendered dreams in exchange for immortality. Structured in five chapters, the film spans silent-era expressionism, film noir and a vampire love story shot in one of Gan’s signature long takes.
Reviewing the film for Variety, Jessica Kiang described it as “a marvelously maximalist movie of opulent ambition that is actually five or six movies, each at once playful and peculiar and part of an overarchingly melancholy elegy for the dream of 20th-century cinema and the lives we lived within it.”
“It is, of course, a paradox to make a film that requires of the viewer the exact spirit of guileless abandon whose disappearance it is built to mourn. But then every moment of ‘Resurrection’ exists on the pivot of a paradox, all of which have their origin in a fundamentally paradoxical premise: a near-future (which is maybe just a curt appraisal of our post-pandemic present) in which dreams are cinema and cinema is dreams, which is bad news for both because nobody dreams anymore,” Kiang added.
A clip from a new interview with Bi Gan, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmaker series, has been made available to Variety. In it, Bi Gan speaks about some of his earliest cinematic influences, from “The Red Balloon” to “Stalker.”
Watch the clip here:
Founded in 1984, the Criterion Collection has built its reputation on publishing classic and contemporary films in high-quality editions across formats – from laserdisc and DVD through Blu-ray, 4K UHD and its streaming platform, the Criterion Channel.
Leave a Reply