‘One Night in Miami’, ‘Sound of Metal’, and ‘Time’ to Enter the Criterion Collection This Year

One Night in Miami Trailer

Until now, Amazon Studios has only had one movie make it into the esteemed Criterion Collection. But in 2021, a trio of feature films from the studio will become the latest entries on the hallowed shelves of Criterion Collection movies.

According to a new report, One Night in Miami, Sound of Metal, and Time will all be added to the collection this year.

IndieWire reports that three of Amazon Studios’ awards contenders for this year will added to the prestigious Criterion Collection, which has been “dedicated to publishing important classic and contemporary films from around the world in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements” since the mid-1980s. The only previous Amazon Studios film to be given this treatment was the 2018 Polish drama Cold War, and now it will be joined by Regina King‘s One Night in Miami, Darius Marder‘s Sound of Metal, and Garrett Bradley‘s documentary Time.

All three of those films are currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video, but inclusion in the Criterion Collection is not always about access (although having an actual disk of these titles will certainly be important to devotees of physical media) – it’s also about the importance that comes with being chosen for inclusion. That importance canonizes these films in a defined way, removing the possibility that they’ll be just another drop in a raging river of streaming content that could be forgotten about in a year. Perhaps a bit more cynically, it also lends the titles an air of legitimacy that just so happens to be bestowed very close to the time that Oscar voters are going to have to start making their selections for nominations. Coincidence? Probably not!

Amazon’s biggest streaming rival, Netflix, recently had a few of its titles added to the Criterion Collection, including The Irishman, Marriage Story, and Roma. (I’m still waiting to find out if 6 Underground is going to make the cut, but my mountain of letters have thus far gone unanswered.)

Here are the trailers for the latest trio of Amazon Studios films to enter the Criterion Collection. And despite my snide theorizing about the cynical angle of the timing for all of this, each of these films is unquestionably worth watching and absolutely worthy of being preserved and discussed and valued and canonized in this way.