After a characteristically stacked summer of restorations, rediscoveries, and contemporary festival favorites, the Criterion Collection has unveiled its September 2026 lineup, and it is a sprawling one. There’s a courtroom classic in 4K, one of cinema’s most monumental Holocaust documentaries, a new Richard Linklater cinephile valentine, a fresh Kleber Mendonça Filho thriller, a Sergei Loznitsa premiere, a Leos Carax box set, and a Satyajit Ray landmark.
Leading the month is Sidney Lumet’s “12 Angry Men,” arriving in a new 4K UHD + Blu-ray special edition on September 8. Lumet’s 1957 feature debut remains one of the defining American courtroom dramas, even if most of the film never actually enters a courtroom. Adapted from Reginald Rose’s teleplay, the film stars Henry Fonda as the lone dissenting juror in a room full of men ready to convict a Puerto Rican teenager accused of murdering his father. Criterion’s edition includes a new 4K digital restoration with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, a Dolby Vision HDR presentation on 4K UHD, the 1954 television version directed by Franklin J. Schaffner for “Studio One,” archival interviews with Lumet, a production history of the project, and Rose and Lumet’s 1956 teleplay “Tragedy in a Temporary Town.”
On September 15, Criterion will also release Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” on Blu-ray in a director-approved four-disc special edition. Lanzmann’s 566-minute work, more than a decade in the making, remains one of the most significant documentaries ever made, an exhaustive and overwhelming investigation of the Holocaust built from first-person testimonies rather than archival footage. The edition includes a 2K digital restoration, three additional Lanzmann films — “A Visitor from the Living,” “Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 pm,” and “The Karski Report” — plus “All I Had Was Nothingness,” a new 2025 film by Guillaume Ribot assembled from previously unreleased footage about the production of “Shoah.”
That same day, Criterion Premieres will release Sergei Loznitsa’s “Two Prosecutors,” a 2025 Kafkaesque thriller set during Stalin’s Great Purge. The film follows an idealistic Soviet prosecutor, played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, who receives a blood-written note smuggled out of a prison block and attempts to investigate the case of an elderly Bolshevik, played by Alexander Filippenko, condemned as a political undesirable. The release includes a Criterion Channel “Meet the Filmmakers” interview with Loznitsa, a trailer, and notes by critic Beatrice Loayza.
September 22 brings two of the month’s biggest contemporary titles. First is Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” a 2025 period thriller starring Wagner Moura as a man who arrives in Recife in 1977 under an alias, hoping to start over with his young son while violence, corruption, and political paranoia close in around him. Criterion’s director-approved edition includes a new 4K digital master approved by Mendonça Filho, “Pictures of Ghosts” as a companion film, a making-of documentary, deleted scenes, archival material that inspired the film, and new interviews with director of photography Evgenia Alexandrova and sound mixer Cyril Holtz.
Also arriving September 22 is Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” a black and white 2025 feature about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.” Guillaume Marbeck stars as Godard, with Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg. The director-approved special edition includes a new 4K digital master supervised and approved by Linklater and director of photography David Chambille, a new audio commentary by Linklater, “Le making of ‘Nouvelle Vague,’” interviews with Linklater and the cast, an audiovisual dossier by critic Farran Smith Nehme, and Linklater’s prerehearsal manifesto read by Deutch.
Criterion closes the month on September 29 with “Three Films by Leos Carax,” a 4K UHD + Blu-ray and Blu-ray set collecting the first three features by Leos Carax: “Boy Meets Girl,” “Mauvais Sang,” and “The Lovers on the Bridge.” The collection centers on the filmmaker’s early collaborations with Denis Lavant, who plays three different characters named Alex across Carax’s feverish tales of outsiders, criminals, and doomed romantics. The set includes new 4K digital restorations, Carax’s 2024 self-portrait film “It’s Not Me,” new interviews with Lavant and editor Nelly Quettier, a new video essay on cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, the documentary “Mr. X: A Vision of Leos Carax,” and extensive archival material, screen tests, behind-the-scenes footage, and trailers.
Rounding out September 29 is Satyajit Ray’s “Days and Nights in the Forest,” arriving in 4K UHD + Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD editions. The 1970 Bengali-language film follows four friends from Kolkata on a countryside trip that gradually exposes their entitlement, prejudices, and fragile egos. Criterion’s edition features a 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 Criterion, along with an introduction by Wes Anderson, a making-of program with new and archival interviews, and a conversation about Ray and the restoration featuring Anderson, Sharmila Tagore, and Film Heritage Foundation founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur.
Criterion’s September 2026 lineup begins with “12 Angry Men” on September 8, followed by “Shoah” and “Two Prosecutors” on September 15, “The Secret Agent” and “Nouvelle Vague” on September 22, and “Three Films by Leos Carax” and “Days and Nights in the Forest” on September 29.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
