The Criterion Collection – September 2026 – New Releases

12 ANGRY MEN
1957 • 96 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

12 Angry Men, directed by Sidney Lumet, may be the most radical courtroom drama in cinema history. A behind-closed-doors look at the American legal system that is as riveting as it is spare, this iconic adaptation of Reginald Rose’s teleplay stars Henry Fonda as the dissenting member on a jury of white men ready to pass judgment on a Puerto Rican teenager charged with murdering his father. The result is a saga of epic proportions that plays out over a tense afternoon in one sweltering room. Lumet’s electrifying snapshot of 1950s America on the verge of change is one of the great feature-film debuts.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features Television version from 1954 of 12 Angry Men, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner for the series Studio One, with an introduction by Ron Simon, curator at the Paley Center for Media Production history of 12 Angry Men, from teleplay to big-screen classic Archival interviews with director Sidney Lumet Interview with screenwriter Walter Bernstein about Lumet Interview with Simon about writer Reginald Rose Tragedy in a Temporary Town (1956), a teleplay directed by Lumet and written by Rose Interview with cinematographer John Bailey about director of photography Boris Kaufman Trailer English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing PLUS: An essay by writer and law professor Thane Rosenbaum.

DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST
1970 • 116 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Bengali with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

One of director Satyajit Ray’s greatest achievements begins with the deceptively easy grace of a buddy comedy—only to give way to darker moral shading. Seeking a weekend escape from the city, four friends from Kolkata embark on a driving trip to the countryside, where their urban entitlement and prejudices are gradually exposed. Among these young bachelors is the overconfident Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), who finds his self-assurance shaken by Aparna (the radiant Sharmila Tagore), an enigmatic young woman whose cool intellect conceals turbulent emotional depths. Filmed luminously amid the sound-dappled splendor of the woodlands of India’s Palamu region, Days and Nights in the Forest deconstructs the masculine ego and India’s fraught class divisions with elegant complexity.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restoration—undertaken by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Film Heritage Foundation, Janus Films, and the Criterion Collection—with uncompressed monaural soundtrack In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features Introduction by filmmaker Wes Anderson Making-of program featuring new and archival interviews with director Satyajit Ray, actors Sharmila Tagore and Rabi Ghosh, and cinematographer Soumendu Roy Conversation about Ray and the film’s restoration featuring Anderson, Tagore, and Film Heritage Foundation founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur Trailer New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by film critic Devika Girish.

SHOAH
1985 • 566 minutes • Color/Black & White • Monaural • In French, Italian, Polish, German, English, Hebrew, and Yiddish with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED FOUR-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES 2K digital restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Three additional films by director Claude Lanzmann: A Visitor from the Living (1999, 68 minutes); Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001, 102 minutes); and The Karski Report (2010, 49 minutes) Conversation between Lanzmann and critic Serge Toubiana Interview with Lanzmann from 2003 about A Visitor from the Living and Sobibór Interview with Caroline Champetier, assistant cameraperson on Shoah, and filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin All I Had Was Nothingness (2025), a new film by Guillaume Ribot, edited from previously unreleased footage and recounting the production of Shoah Trailer English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing PLUS: An essay by critic Kent Jones and writings by Lanzmann.

TWO PROSECUTORS PART OF CRITERION PREMIERES 2025 • 118 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Russian and Ukrainian with English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

Summoned with a blood-written note smuggled out of a prison block, an idealistic Soviet prosecutor (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) pushes past the jail’s leery authorities to interview an elderly, broken-down Bolshevik (Alexander Filippenko) condemned as a political undesirable. The young attorney, determined to expose this miscarriage of justice to the authorities in Moscow, soon finds his efforts stymied as an ever-tightening net of suspicion encircles his investigation. Set at the height of the Great Purge and drenched in the paranoia of Stalin’s police state, the latest triumph from director Sergei Loznitsa is a chilling, Kafkaesque thriller about the impunity of power and the matter-of-fact horrors of totalitarianism.

INCLUDES Meet the Filmmakers: Sergei Loznitsa, a Criterion Channel original interview Trailer Notes by critic Beatrice Loayza.

THE SECRET AGENT
2025 • 161 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Portuguese with English subtitles • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

With an electrifying blend of kinetic punch and elegiac historical sweep, Kleber Mendonça Filho connects life under Brazil’s twentieth-century military dictatorship to the living present, delivering a kaleidoscopic period thriller pulsing with resonance. In 1977, under the alias Armando, a man (Wagner Moura) arrives in the city of Recife to try to make a fresh start with his young son. However, the threat of violence immediately encroaches, while around him swirl corrupt cops, grimy hit men, haunted exiles, and a wild urban legend that ignites a public frenzy. Continually spinning off its temporal and narrative axes, The Secret Agent unfurls an epic canvas teeming with life and love for those who refuse to submit to systems of oppression.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital master, approved by director Kleber Mendonça Filho, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features Pictures of Ghosts (2023), a companion film by Mendonça Filho Making-of documentary featuring interviews with Mendonça Filho, actor Wagner Moura, and other members of the cast and crew New interviews with director of photography Evgenia Alexandrova and sound mixer Cyril Holtz New video essay featuring Mendonça Filho Deleted scenes Archival material that inspired the film, with commentary by Mendonça Filho Trailer New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by film programmer and curator Dennis Lim.

NOUVELLE VAGUE
2025 • 106 minutes • Black & White • 5.1 surround • In French and English with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

It’s 1959, and a young Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) is the only one among his film-critic peers at Cahiers du cinéma not to have made a feature film. Determined to put his revolutionary cinematic ideas into practice, he brings his small crew and two stars—an eager unknown named Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and wary Hollywood expat Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch)—onto the streets of Paris to shoot Breathless, an adventure in unfettered creativity that would soon upend the way movies are made. With this enthralling love letter from one cinematic maverick to another, director Richard Linklater captures, with buoyant humor and effortless charm, the intoxicating joy of being young, breaking all the rules, and making art without boundaries.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital master, supervised and approved by director Richard Linklater and director of photography David Chambille, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features New audio commentary featuring Linklater Le making of “Nouvelle Vague” (2025), directed by Lucie Saada Interviews with Linklater and actors Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, and Guillaume Marbeck Within the Wave, an audiovisual dossier on the real-life figures depicted in the film, by critic Farran Smith Nehme Linklater’s prerehearsal manifesto, read by Deutch Selection of trailers from French New Wave films Trailer English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio PLUS: An essay by critic Nick James, an introduction by Linklater, and (in the 4K UHD and Blu-ray editions) an essay by coscreenwriter Vince Palmo.

THREE FILMS BY LEOS CARAX Burning with stylistic freedom, the first three features by Leos Carax are cinema at its most ecstatically sensorial and deliriously romantic. Built around virtuosic, intensely physical performances from Denis Lavant as three different characters named Alex, these tales of outsiders, criminals, and doomed lovers living on the edge blaze with the whirlwind abandon of youth and the thrilling highs and torturous lows of all-consuming passion. Love letters to the city of Paris, with its streets transformed by cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier into expressive dreamscapes, these three films erupt in moments of anarchic euphoria that fuse sound and image to heart-stopping effect.

BOY MEETS GIRL 1984 • 104 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio Made when he was just twenty-three years old, Leos Carax’s rapturous debut feature returns French cinema to the unfettered experimentation of the New Wave while updating it for the punk 1980s. In velvety black and white, Boy Meets Girl evokes a surreal nocturnal Paris populated by lost souls and wandering misfits, including Alex (Denis Lavant), a disaffected would-be filmmaker whose girlfriend has just left him for his best friend, and Mireille (Mireille Perrier), an aspiring actress nursing her own heartbreak. Drawn together by fate, they share a moment of intense, fleeting connection as bright-burning and ephemeral as youth itself.

MAUVAIS SANG 1986 • 120 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio With his exhilarating second feature, Leos Carax infuses a neonoir scenario with a delirious strain of doomed romanticism for a tour de force of avant-pop invention. Amid the spread of STBO—a sexually transmitted disease acquired by having sex without emotion— a young ex-con (Denis Lavant) is recruited by a veteran criminal (Michel Piccoli) to steal the antidote, only to find himself entangled in a dangerous affair with his new associate’s lover (Juliette Binoche). Constructed with the kinetic verve of a musical, Mauvais sang explodes in moments of pure cinematic adrenaline, from a dizzying skydive to Lavant’s heart-pounding nighttime sprint set to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.”

THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE 1991 • 125 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio With this feverish saga of amour fou, Leos Carax pushed his ambitions to glorious new heights. Michèle (Juliette Binoche), an artist who is losing her sight, meets Alex (Denis Lavant), a homeless street performer, while sleeping rough on Paris’s centuries-old Pont-Neuf, beginning an obsessive affair that soon collides with crushing reality. The result of an infamously lengthy, arduous production, The Lovers on the Bridge is a bracing plunge into life on the city’s turbulent margins—a visually arresting, musically intoxicating film that is never more dazzling than when the lovers water-ski madly across the Seine amid a shower of fireworks.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restorations, with uncompressed monaural (Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais sang) and 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio (The Lovers on the Bridge) soundtracks In the 4K UHD edition: Three 4K UHD discs of the films (with The Lovers on the Bridge presented in Dolby Vision HDR) and three Blu-rays with the films and special features It’s Not Me (2024), a self-portrait film by director Leos Carax New interviews with actor Denis Lavant and editor Nelly Quettier New video essay on the cinematography of Jean-Yves Escoffier Meet the Filmmakers: Leos Carax, a Criterion Channel original interview Mr. X: A Vision of Leos Carax (2014), a documentary on Carax’s work Le Pont-Neuf des amants (1991), a documentary on the making of the main set for The Lovers on the Bridge Deleted scene, rushes, screen tests, behind-the-scenes footage, and trailers New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by author Amina Cain.