THE CRITERION COLLECTION - MAY 2026 - NEW RELEASES

Thursday 19th February 2026 - posted by Eric_Cotenas

STRAY DOG

1949 • 122 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Japanese with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. With each step, cop’s and criminal’s lives become more intertwined and the investigation becomes an examination of Murakami’s own dark side. Starring Toshiro Mifune as the rookie cop and Takashi Shimura as the seasoned detective who keeps him on the right side of the law, Stray Dog goes beyond crime thriller, probing the squalid world of postwar Japan and the nature of the criminal mind.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, 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
- Audio commentary by Stephen Prince, author of The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa
- Short documentary on Stray Dog, from the series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create, featuring interviews with director Akira Kurosawa, production designer Yoshiro Muraki, actor Keiko Awaji, and others
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Terrence Rafferty and an excerpt from Kurosawa’s book Something Like an Autobiography

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION - SRP: $49.95 - PREBOOK: 3/31/26 - STREET: 5/5/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3805UHDBD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-418-5 - UPC: 7-15515-33321-4 - DISC COUNT: 2

BLU-RAY EDITION - SRP: $39.95 - PREBOOK: 3/31/26 - STREET: 5/5/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3806BD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-419-2 - UPC: 7-15515-33331-3 - DISC COUNT: 1

THE DELTA

1996 • 84 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

The complexities of race, class, and sexuality collide within a Memphis community in the strikingly raw debut feature from director Ira Sachs. With neorealist immediacy, The Delta tells what at first appears to be a simple love story: two young men—Lincoln (Shayne Gray), a closeted white teenager, and Minh (Thang Chan), a Black Vietnamese immigrant—meet at a cruising spot and embark on a nighttime journey by boat down the Mississippi River. But soon, imbalances of power and privilege emerge between them, as the film develops into a devastating vision of lost, wounded souls reaching out in the dark for human connection.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 2K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Ira Sachs, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Audio commentary from 2001 featuring Sachs
- New interview with Sachs, conducted by film critic Keith Uhlich
- Two short films by Sachs: Vaudeville (1991) and Lady (1993)
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author and film curator Michael Koresky

BLU-RAY EDITION - SRP: $39.95 - PREBOOK: 4/7/26 - STREET: 5/12/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3809BD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-422-2 - UPC: 7-15515-33371-9 - DISC COUNT: 1

PETER HUJAR’S DAY

PART OF CRITERION PREMIERES

2025 • 76 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

A loving snapshot of a vanished New York, director Ira Sachs’s captivating cultural time capsule is a warm, witty, graceful re-creation of a real-life conversation that took place between photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) in 1974. Peter Hujar’s Day eavesdrops on the two friends’ leisurely, affectionate hangout as Hujar recounts his previous day’s activities, offering insights into both his art and his everyday life. What emerges is a touching celebration of creativity, connection, and simply being present, made exceptionally vivid by Sachs’s cinematic flourishes and wonderfully tender performances from Whishaw and Hall, whose chemistry gives the film its heart and soul.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- Meet the Filmmakers: Ira Sachs, a Criterion Channel original interview
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Notes by author and film curator Michael Koresky

BLU-RAY EDITION - SRP: $29.95 - PREBOOK: 4/7/26 - STREET: 5/12/26 - CAT. NO.: JF051BD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-429-1 - UPC: 7-15515-33441-9 - DISC COUNT: 1

DVD EDITION - SRP: $24.95 - PREBOOK: 4/7/26 - STREET: 5/12/26 - CAT. NO.: JF052DVD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-430-7 - UPC: 7-15515-33451-8 - DISC COUNT: 1

BODY HEAT

1981 • 113 minutes • Color • Stereo • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

With his debut feature, acclaimed writer-director Lawrence Kasdan brilliantly updated the conventions of 1940s film noir for the 1980s, resulting in one of the steamiest and most influential erotic thrillers ever made. On the sultry South Florida coast, lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt) is drawn into a torrid affair with unhappily married housewife Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner, in a star-making performance)—and it’s not long before they’ve hatched a scheme to murder her wealthy husband. Featuring ingenious plot twists, memorable hard-boiled dialogue, and an atmosphere so evocative you can practically feel the humidity, Body Heat is a languorously seductive tale of greed and desire, one that paved a new path for American crime cinema.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised by editor Carol Littleton and approved by director Lawrence Kasdan, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack
- Alternate 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New interview with Kasdan
- New conversation between Littleton and film historian Bobbie O’Steen
- Archival programs featuring Kasdan; Littleton; actors William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Ted Danson; cinematographer Richard H. Kline; and composer John Barry
- Deleted scenes
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author Megan Abbott

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION - SRP: $49.95 - PREBOOK: 4/14/26 - STREET: 5/19/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3807UHDBD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-420-8 - UPC: 7-15515-33351-1 - DISC COUNT: 2

BLU-RAY EDITION - SRP: $39.95 - PREBOOK: 4/14/26 - STREET: 5/19/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3808BD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-421-5 - UPC: 7-15515-33361-0 - DISC COUNT: 1

FRESH KILL

1994 • 79 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

A disturbingly prescient ecofeminist parable and a brain-wave-scrambling cyberpunk fantasia, the debut feature from new-media pioneer Shu Lea Cheang merges a bold vision of resistance with an exuberant early-internet aesthetic. In a dystopian-chic New York where sushi joints and toxic-waste sites exist side by side, a lesbian couple (Sarita Choudhury and Erin McMurtry) turn to the hacker underground to solve their daughter’s disappearance, in the process exposing a conspiracy involving corporate greenwashing and tainted fish. Swinging between outré satire and agitprop, Fresh Kill sounds the alarm about a capitalist system that pollutes everything from our waterways to our bodies to our minds.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K restoration, supervised and approved by director Shu Lea Cheang and director of photography Jane Castle, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- New interviews with Cheang and actor Sarita Choudhury
- New program highlighting the 2024 theatrical rerelease of the film and Cheang’s self-distribution
- Discussion with Cheang for the film’s thirtieth anniversary, moderated by scholar Jigna Desai, and presented by the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara
- LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative profile of Cheang, recipient of the organization’s 2024 award for artist achievement
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by artist and technologist Mindy Seu

BLU-RAY EDITION - SRP: $39.95 - PREBOOK: 4/14/26 - STREET: 5/19/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3810BD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-423-9 - UPC: 7-15515-33381-8 - DISC COUNT: 1

SENTIMENTAL VALUE

2025 • 133 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Norwegian and English with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Joachim Trier, one of contemporary cinema’s great humanists, excavates layers of history and memory—both national and personal—for this rich, ineffably moving story of one family’s attempts to come to terms with generations of trauma and healing. After the death of their mother, two sisters must contend with the return home to Norway of their estranged father, celebrated filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård). In the case of Nora (Renate Reinsve), an actor, he hopes to reconnect by casting her in his new film—a project that both inflicts fresh wounds and reopens old ones. With a virtuoso ensemble cast that also includes Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (in a breakout performance) and Elle Fanning, Trier’s film delicately balances each moment of humor and hurt, conducting a stunning emotional exploration of how the past echoes in the present and art can transform pain into catharsis.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital master, approved by director Joachim Trier, 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 conversation between Trier and filmmaker Mike Mills
- New selected-scene commentaries by Trier, coscreenwriter Eskil Vogt, production designer Jørgen Stangebye Larsen, and sound designer Gisle Tveito
- New interviews with actors Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning
- Deleted scenes
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author Karl Ove Knausgård

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION - SRP: $49.95 - PREBOOK: 4/21/26 - STREET: 5/26/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3811UHDBD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-424-6 - UPC: 7-15515-33391-7 - DISC COUNT: 2

BLU-RAY EDITION - SRP: $39.95 - PREBOOK: 4/21/26 - STREET: 5/26/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3812BD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-425-3 - UPC: 7-15515-33401-3 - DISC COUNT: 1

DVD EDITION - SRP: $29.95 - PREBOOK: 4/21/26 - STREET: 5/26/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3813DDVD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-426-0 - UPC: 7-15515-33411-2 - DISC COUNT: 2

LENNY

1974 • 111 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Director Bob Fosse’s nervy, freewheeling showbiz drama tells the real-life story of taboo-shattering comedian Lenny Bruce, the counterculture prophet whose unfiltered style opened up new frontiers in self-expression. Dustin Hoffman brings a live-wire intensity to his portrayal of the motormouthed Bruce as he goes from small-time strip-club emcee to free-speech lightning rod, while Valerie Perrine lends the film its soul with her deeply affecting performance as his wife, Honey, an innocent lost on the dark side of bohemia. A complex portrayal of one iconoclast by another, Fosse’s film makes deft use of stark monochrome photography and kinetic editing to vividly capture Bruce’s smoky, seedy backstage world.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary from 2015 featuring film historians Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo
- Archival interview with actors Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine
- Interview with editor Alan Heim
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Harris and a 1975 interview with director Bob Fosse

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION - SRP: $49.95 - PREBOOK: 4/21/26 - STREET: 5/26/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3814UHDBD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-427-7 - UPC: 7-15515-33421-1 - DISC COUNT: 2

BLU-RAY EDITION - SRP: $39.95 - PREBOOK: 4/21/26 - STREET: 5/26/26 - CAT. NO.: CC3815BD - ISBN: 979-8-88607-428-4 - UPC: 7-15515-33431-0 - DISC COUNT: 1

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