August 2026 Criterion Collection Releases: Six Essential Additions to Your Shelf

 

August brings an unusually rich batch of additions to the Criterion Collection, with six releases that range from intimate psychological horror to sprawling activist documentaries. There is a fascinating thread running through the month’s lineup: outsiders pushing against systems that would rather silence them, whether those systems are corporate, political, familial, colonial, or simply societal. Here is a look at what makes each release worth your attention, and why these are films you will want to make room for on your shelf.

1. Safe : LINK

 

Todd Haynes’ Safe remains one of those films that becomes more unsettling the longer you sit with it. Julianne Moore is extraordinary as Carol White, an affluent Southern California housewife who develops a mysterious illness and becomes convinced that environmental toxins are making her sick. What begins as a medical mystery gradually becomes something far more disturbing, as Haynes turns Carol’s search for an explanation into a critique of wellness culture, class, alienation, and the desperate human need to believe that someone, somewhere, has an answer.

The genius of Safe is that it refuses to tell you exactly what is happening. Is Carol physically ill? Psychologically unraveling? Both? Neither? Haynes keeps the ambiguity alive, turning everyday spaces into increasingly hostile environments. It is a film that feels eerily more relevant with every passing year.

Criterion’s new director approved 4K edition makes this an especially exciting addition, with a restoration supervised by Haynes, Dolby Vision HDR, and an excellent collection of supplements. The commentary featuring Haynes, Moore, and producer Christine Vachon alone makes this an essential purchase, while their conversation and Haynes’ 1978 short The Suicide provide even more context for one of the most distinctive films of the 1990s.

2. Coup de torchon : LINK

Bertrand Tavernier takes Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 and relocates its story to French West Africa in the 1930s, transforming a hard-boiled crime story into something considerably darker and more politically charged. Coup de torchon is funny, disturbing, absurd, and increasingly horrifying as Philippe Noiret’s seemingly ineffectual police chief descends into violence and revenge.

What makes the film so fascinating is Tavernier’s ability to use the conventions of noir to expose the rotten foundations of colonial power. The further the story progresses, the more the distinction between justice, corruption, and cruelty disappears.

Criterion’s new 4K restoration gives the film a welcome home-video upgrade, while the supplements broaden its context considerably. Tavernier’s archival interview, a new discussion of Thompson with Robert Polito, the making-of documentary, and an alternate ending make this a particularly worthwhile edition for anyone interested in the relationship between crime cinema and political history.

3. Harlan County USA: LINK

Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning Harlan County USA is documentary filmmaking at its most immediate and uncompromising. Following a thirteen-month coal miners’ strike in Kentucky, Kopple places herself alongside workers fighting not simply for better wages, but for their dignity and survival.

What makes the film so powerful is its intimacy. This isn't history observed from a comfortable distance. Kopple gets inside the conflict, capturing confrontations with strikebreakers, police, and company forces while allowing the miners and their families to tell their own stories. The extraordinary soundtrack, featuring artists including Hazel Dickens and Florence Reece, gives the film an almost mythic quality.

The new director-approved 4K restoration is reason enough to revisit it, but Criterion has gone further with a commentary from Kopple and editor Nancy Baker, a making-of documentary, outtakes, interviews with Dickens and John Sayles, and a fascinating 2005 Sundance panel featuring Kopple and Roger Ebert. It is both an essential documentary and an essential piece of American labor history.

4. American Dream: LINK

If Harlan County USA documents workers fighting to protect what they have, American Dream examines what happens when that fight begins to collapse. Kopple's Oscar-winning follow-up follows the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Minnesota, where disagreements within the labor movement eventually fracture a community.

The film's greatest strength is its refusal to reduce the conflict to heroes and villains. People who began on the same side find themselves divided, desperate workers cross picket lines, and the political and economic pressures surrounding the strike become increasingly impossible to escape. Kopple captures the human cost of organized labor's decline with remarkable empathy.

Criterion’s new 4K restoration makes this long-overdue release particularly significant, especially alongside Harlan County USA. The 1992 interview with Kopple and Thom Powers’ essay offer useful additional context, but the real value is having these two landmark documentaries together. They form an extraordinary cinematic record of American workers confronting institutions that seem almost impossible to fight.

5. Little Odessa: LINK

James Gray was only twenty-five when he won the Silver Lion at Venice for Little Odessa, and watching the film now, it is easy to understand why people immediately recognized something special. Beneath its gangster-movie surface is a devastating family tragedy, with Tim Roth's hit man returning to his Brooklyn neighborhood and finding himself forced back into the orbit of his abusive father, dying mother, and younger brother.

Gray's filmmaking already displays the fatalism that would define much of his later work. Violence isn't simply something that happens to these characters. It feels inherited, almost inevitable, passed from one generation to the next.

Criterion's new director-approved restoration is a beautiful opportunity to revisit Gray's debut, while the supplements provide an excellent retrospective perspective. Gray's 2000 commentary, a making-of documentary, and a new conversation with Sean Fennessey all help illuminate the beginnings of one of contemporary American cinema's most distinctive voices. For anyone who has followed Gray's career, this is an essential piece of the puzzle.

6. Eclipse Series 49: Five Radical Documentaries by Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi: LINK

The month's most ambitious release is also its most uncompromising. Bringing together five documentaries made between 1972 and 2016, this Eclipse set introduces a remarkable body of work from director Kazuo Hara and producer Sachiko Kobayashi.

From disability and sexual liberation in Goodbye CP and Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 to wartime atrocities in The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On and the devastating consequences of asbestos exposure in Sennan Asbestos Disaster, these films repeatedly turn their cameras toward people and institutions society would rather ignore.

Hara's approach is confrontational, intimate, and sometimes uncomfortable. His subjects aren't passive figures being documented from afar. They become participants in the filmmaking itself, often pushing back against the camera and the filmmaker. That tension is precisely what makes the work so alive.

Having all five films together is an extraordinary opportunity to discover a filmmaker whose work deserves far greater attention. With an essay by film scholar Markus Nornes, this Eclipse release isn't just a collection of documentaries. It is a portrait of an uncompromising cinematic philosophy, and easily one of August's most exciting additions to the Criterion library.

Six releases, six very different films, and yet August's lineup feels remarkably cohesive. Whether you're interested in American labor history, Japanese activist cinema, psychological horror, colonialism, or the origins of a major American filmmaker, there is something here worth adding to the collection. And as always with Criterion, the appeal isn't simply owning the movies. It's having the context, restoration, scholarship, and conversations that allow you to keep discovering them long after the credits roll.