September is shaping up to be one of the most exciting months of the year for the Criterion Collection. From a landmark American courtroom drama and one of the most important documentaries ever made to contemporary political thrillers and a trio of essential Leos Carax films, this month's lineup is remarkably eclectic. There is also something especially satisfying about the range here: these are films about power, rebellion, prejudice, desire, memory, and the people who refuse to simply accept the world around them.
1. 12 Angry Men
Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men remains one of the great examples of how to make a film feel enormous without ever leaving a single room. What begins as twelve jurors deciding the fate of a Puerto Rican teenager accused of murdering his father gradually becomes an examination of prejudice, masculinity, democracy, and the responsibilities of dissent.
Henry Fonda's quiet juror isn't necessarily the smartest man in the room. He is simply willing to ask whether everyone else might be wrong. Lumet turns that seemingly simple question into gripping drama, using the increasingly claustrophobic room and shifting dynamics between the jurors to create extraordinary tension.
Criterion's new 4K edition makes this iconic debut an even more essential library addition. Alongside the restoration are the 1954 television version, archival interviews with Lumet, production history, and the Lumet and Reginald Rose teleplay Tragedy in a Temporary Town. It is an excellent package for understanding how a television play became one of American cinema's defining courtroom dramas.
2. Shoah
There are movies that you watch, and there are movies that you experience. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah belongs firmly in the latter category. Running for more than nine hours, this monumental investigation of the Holocaust deliberately avoids archival footage, instead building its devastating portrait through testimony from survivors, witnesses, and former Nazis.
Lanzmann's approach makes the past feel horrifyingly immediate. The film isn't simply reconstructing history; it examines how memory survives, how trauma is transmitted, and how an atrocity of unimaginable scale can still be understood through individual voices.
Criterion's four-Blu-ray edition is an extraordinary scholarly and cinematic resource. Alongside the 2K restoration are three additional Lanzmann films, a conversation with critic Serge Toubiana, interviews about his work, Lanzmann's own writings, and All I Had Was Nothingness, Guillaume Ribot's 2025 film assembled from previously unreleased footage. This is unquestionably one of the most significant additions to the Criterion library this year.
3. Two Prosecutors
Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors is a chilling journey into the machinery of Stalinist repression. When a young Soviet prosecutor attempts to investigate the mistreatment of a political prisoner, his pursuit of justice gradually becomes a trap of paranoia and suspicion.
The film's Kafkaesque quality is precisely what makes it so unnerving. Nobody needs to openly explain how the system works because everyone already understands it. Bureaucracy becomes a weapon, truth becomes dangerous, and simply asking the wrong question can make you part of the investigation.
As a recent film entering the Criterion Collection, Two Prosecutors also demonstrates that Criterion isn't simply preserving established classics. It continues to identify contemporary filmmaking that deserves to be part of the larger cinematic conversation. Loznitsa's austere, politically charged thriller feels particularly at home alongside the collection's historic examinations of authoritarianism and institutional power.
4. The Secret Agent
What makes the film so exhilarating is its refusal to settle into a conventional thriller structure. Mendonça Filho continually shifts perspectives, tones, and even temporal rhythms, creating a film that feels as alive and unpredictable as the city it depicts. Wagner Moura anchors the chaos with a performance that gives the film its emotional center.
Criterion's director-approved 4K edition is packed with material, including Pictures of Ghosts, a making-of documentary, new interviews with key collaborators, deleted scenes, archival material that inspired the film, and a new video essay from Mendonça Filho. It is exactly the kind of comprehensive edition that makes a recent film feel like an instant Criterion essential.
5. Nouvelle Vague
Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague is a joyous love letter to the moment when Jean-Luc Godard and his collaborators blew open the possibilities of filmmaking with Breathless. Rather than treating the French New Wave as untouchable cinematic history, Linklater brings it back to life as a story about young people who simply wanted to make movies differently.
The film captures that intoxicating combination of arrogance, creativity, friendship, and youthful freedom that comes with believing the rules are there to be broken. Guillaume Marbeck, Aubry Dullin, and Zoey Deutch are wonderful at capturing the spirit of the filmmakers and performers they portray.
The Criterion edition doubles down on that playful historical perspective, featuring Linklater's commentary, a making-of documentary, interviews with the cast, an audiovisual dossier on the real-life figures, Linklater's prerehearsal manifesto, and a selection of French New Wave trailers. For cinephiles, this is practically catnip.
6. Three Films by Leos Carax
Few filmmakers have made romantic obsession look as physically exhilarating as Leos Carax. This new collection brings together Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais sang, and The Lovers on the Bridge, three films that established Carax as one of cinema's great visual romantics.
Denis Lavant appears as three variations on Carax's recurring outsider figure, while Paris becomes something closer to a dreamscape than a city. Whether it's the electric nighttime energy of Mauvais sang or the spectacular madness of The Lovers on the Bridge, these are films that seem to run on pure cinematic instinct.
Criterion's three-disc 4K package is a spectacular home for the trilogy, with restorations of all three films, Carax's It's Not Me, interviews with Lavant and editor Nelly Quettier, a cinematography video essay, documentaries about Carax and The Lovers on the Bridge, behind-the-scenes footage, screen tests, deleted material, and more. For anyone discovering Carax for the first time, this is the perfect introduction. For longtime admirers, it's almost impossible to resist.
7. Days and Nights in the Forest
Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest begins like a breezy getaway movie before gradually revealing itself as something far more incisive. Four middle-class friends leave Kolkata for the countryside, where their assumptions about class, privilege, masculinity, and one another begin to unravel.
Ray's great achievement is how effortlessly he allows the film's social commentary to emerge from character. The chemistry between Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore gives the film its emotional spark, while the beautiful landscapes conceal an increasingly uncomfortable examination of urban entitlement.
This new 4K restoration is particularly meaningful, having been undertaken through The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project at L'Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with the Film Heritage Foundation, Janus Films, and Criterion. Add an introduction from Wes Anderson and a restoration conversation featuring Anderson, Tagore, and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, and this becomes both a major Ray release and an important preservation effort.
September's Criterion lineup is impressive not simply because of the names involved, but because of the breadth of cinema it represents. From Lumet and Ray to Lanzmann, Carax, Linklater, Loznitsa, and Mendonça Filho, these seven releases span decades, countries, genres, and radically different cinematic philosophies. More importantly, each edition gives these films a new life at home, pairing exceptional restorations with the conversations, archival material, and scholarship that make Criterion so much more than a label. For cinephiles, September is going to be an expensive month.
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