Following the Cannes premiere of his new drama “Paper Tiger,” right on cue, one of James Gray’s formative early works is getting the Criterion treatment. The Criterion Collection’s August 2026 slate is led by “Little Odessa,” Gray’s 1994 debut and a moodt Brooklyn crime drama that already carried many of the signatures that would define his career: family rupture, immigrant enclaves, wounded sons, and violence treated as an dark inheritance.
Criterion will release “Little Odessa” on August 25 in a director-approved 4K UHD + Blu-ray combo edition and a standalone Blu-ray edition, both built around a new 4K digital restoration supervised and approved by Gray. The film stars Tim Roth as Joshua, a volatile hit man whose latest assignment brings him back to the Brighton Beach neighborhood where he grew up, forcing him into collision with his abusive father, played by Maximilian Schell, his ailing mother, played by Vanessa Redgrave, and his loyal teenage brother, played by Edward Furlong.
Gray was only twenty-five when “Little Odessa” won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and Criterion’s release positions the film as both a gangster drama and a family tragedy, a fatalistic noir about violence that starts in the home before spreading outward. Special features include a 2000 audio commentary from Gray, David Thompson’s making-of documentary “Once Upon a Time… ‘Little Odessa,’” a new conversation between Gray and Sean Fennessey, and an essay by Glenn Kenny.
The August lineup also brings a major 4K upgrade for Todd Haynes’ “Safe,” arriving August 4 in a director-approved 4K UHD + Blu-ray edition. The 1995 film stars Julianne Moore in her breakthrough role as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife whose unexplained illness sends her into a terrifying spiral of environmental dread, self-help language, class alienation, and invisible horror. The new release includes a 4K restoration supervised and approved by Haynes, an audio commentary with Haynes, Moore, and producer Christine Vachon, a conversation between Haynes and Moore, Haynes’ 1978 short film “The Suicide,” an interview with Vachon, and an essay by Dennis Lim.
On August 11, Criterion will release Bertrand Tavernier’s “Coup de torchon” on Blu-ray, with a new 4K restoration and a new English subtitle translation. Tavernier’s 1981 existential crime thriller relocates Jim Thompson’s “Pop. 1280” from the American South to 1930s French West Africa, with Philippe Noiret starring as a seemingly inept police chief whose passivity hides something far colder. Isabelle Huppert co-stars as his mistress, drawn into the film’s widening circle of colonial rot, revenge, and absurdity. Extras include a 2001 interview with Tavernier, a new interview with critic and poet Robert Polito about Thompson, a making-of program, an alternate ending, trailers, and an essay by Lynn Anthony Higgins.
Criterion’s August 25 slate also gives Barbara Kopple a substantial spotlight with new editions of two Oscar-winning documentaries. “Harlan County USA,” Kopple’s 1976 account of a Kentucky coal miners’ strike, arrives in a director-approved 4K UHD + Blu-ray edition and a Blu-ray edition, featuring a new 4K restoration supervised and approved by Kopple, an audio commentary by Kopple and editor Nancy Baker, a making-of documentary, outtakes, interviews with Hazel Dickens and John Sayles, and a 2005 Sundance Film Festival panel with Kopple and Roger Ebert.
Kopple’s “American Dream,” her 1990 documentary about the 1985–86 Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota, will also arrive on Blu-ray August 25. The director-approved edition includes a new 4K restoration, a 1992 interview with Kopple, a trailer, and an essay by Thom Powers.
The month’s deepest cut may be “Eclipse Series 49: Five Radical Documentaries By Kazuo Hara And Sachiko Kobayashi,” a four-disc Blu-ray set arriving August 25. The collection gathers “Goodbye CP,” “Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974,” “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” “A Dedicated Life,” and “Sennan Asbestos Disaster,” five confrontational works directed by Kazuo Hara and produced by Sachiko Kobayashi. The set spans more than four decades of Japanese documentary filmmaking, with subjects ranging from disability activism and feminist self-liberation to wartime atrocity, literary mythmaking, and industrial negligence.
Criterion’s August 2026 titles arrive throughout the month, with “Safe” landing first on August 4, “Coup de torchon” following on August 11, and “Little Odessa,” “Harlan County USA,” “American Dream,” and the Kazuo Hara/Sachiko Kobayashi Eclipse set all arriving August 25.
