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    Criterion Collection Announces August Titles Including Works From Todd Haynes, James Gray & More

    A man in a leather jacket points a gun at another man's head in a dimly lit room, with two other men sitting nearby watching the scene.

    The Criterion Collection has announced six new titles to join the collection on 4K UHD and Blu-Ray in August: Safe (1995), Coup de torchon (1981), Harlan County USA (1976), American Dream (1990), Little Odessa (1994), and Eclipse Series 49: Five Radical Documentaries by Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi (1972 – 2016). These represent a prescient commentary on self-help culture from Todd Haynes, an existential crime thriller, two unflinching, Oscar-winning reports from the trenches of working-class America by Barbara Kopple, a Brooklyn gangster drama from James Gray, and five works that wage war against the conformism of modern Japanese society. Details on these films can be found below:

    Three Reasons: Safe

    Safe (4K UHD Blu-Ray)

    Street Date: August 4, 2026

    A woman with a neutral expression is framed in the center, with modern architecture and a vintage car in the background. Text reads "Safe, A Film by Todd Haynes." Criterion Collection label on the side.Synopsis: Julianne Moore gives a breakthrough performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has frighteningly extreme environmental allergies. A profoundly unsettling work from the great American director Todd Haynes, Safe functions on multiple levels: as a prescient commentary on self-help culture, as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, as a drama about class and social estrangement, and as a horror film about what you cannot see. This revelatory drama was named the best film of the 1990s in a Village Voice poll of more than fifty critics.

    DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

    • New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Todd Haynes, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
    • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
    • Audio commentary featuring Haynes, actor Julianne Moore, and producer Christine Vachon
    • Conversation between Haynes and Moore
    • The Suicide, a 1978 short film by Haynes
    • Interview with Vachon
    • Trailer
    • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
    • PLUS: An essay by critic Dennis Lim

     

    Coup de torchon (Blu-Ray)

    Street Date: August 11, 2026

    A woman in a white dress holds a revolver and sits in front of a large shadowy figure; text reads "Coup de Torchon, Directed by Bertrand Tavernier.Synopsis: With this existential crime thriller, legend of French cinema Bertrand Tavernier transforms Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled novel Pop. 1280 into a darkly comic, philosophically provocative exploration of the brutality and absurdity of colonialism. Moving the story’s setting from the American South to 1930s French West Africa, Coup de torchon features a frighteningly enigmatic performance from Philippe Noiret as a police chief whose seeming ineptitude masks a cold-blooded pursuit of revenge and control that draws his opportunistic mistress (a fiery Isabelle Huppert) into an escalating spiral of violence. With each chilling revelation, Tavernier plunges us ever deeper into an abyss of madness and corruption, laying bare the decaying soul of empire.

    BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

    • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
    • Interview from 2001 with director Bertrand Tavernier
    • New interview with critic and poet Robert Polito about source-novel author Jim Thompson
    • Making-of program featuring on-set footage and interviews with members of the cast and crew
    • Alternate ending
    • Trailers
    • New English subtitle translation
    • PLUS: An essay by scholar Lynn Anthony Higgins

     

    Harlan County USA (4K UHD & Blu-Ray)

    Street Date: August 25, 2026

    Collage of black-and-white and color photos showing protests, miners, and signs, with the text "Harlan County USA" and "a film by Barbara Kopple" on the cover.Synopsis: Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning Harlan County USA unflinchingly documents a coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. With a haunting soundtrack—featuring legendary country and bluegrass artists Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis, David Morris, Sarah Ogan Gunning, and Florence Reece—the film is a heartbreaking record of the thirteen-month struggle between a community fighting to survive and a corporation dedicated to the bottom line.

    DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

    • New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Barbara Kopple, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
    • One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
    • Audio commentary by Kopple and editor Nancy Baker
    • Making-of documentary featuring interviews with Kopple, crew members, and strike participants featured in the film
    • Outtakes from the film
    • Interview with bluegrass singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens
    • Interview with filmmaker John Sayles
    • Panel discussion from the 2005 Sundance Film Festival featuring Kopple and critic Roger Ebert
    • Trailer
    • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

     

    American Dream (Blu-Ray)

    Street Date: August 25, 2026

    A movie poster for "American Dream" featuring photos of workers protesting, picketing, and attending rallies, with bold red text displaying the film title and director’s name, Barbara Kopple.Synopsis: Winner of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, Barbara Kopple’s American Dream details the tumultuous 1985–86 labor strike against Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota. Fed up with dangerous plant conditions and drastic wage cuts, Austin’s Local P-9 went against the advice of its parent union and, aided by an activist campaign to damage the meatpacking giant’s reputation, conducted a nearly yearlong walkout. But as the strike dragged on, some workers found themselves desperate enough to cross the picket line, dividing a community already roiled by blockades, riots, and the intervention of the National Guard. Following up her landmark documentary Harlan County USA with another uncompromising report from the trenches of working-class America, Kopple captures the human and political costs of one of the most significant setbacks to organized labor amid the unchecked corporatism of the Reagan era.

    DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

    • New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Barbara Kopple, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
    • Interview from 1992 with Kopple
    • Trailer
    • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
    • PLUS: An essay by film programmer Thom Powers

     

    Little Odessa (4K UHD & Blu-Ray)

    Street Date: August 25, 2026

    Silhouetted figures stand against a dark, forested backdrop with the title "Little Odessa" and actor names displayed above. Criterion Collection label is on the left side. Synopsis: A Dostoevskian family tragedy in the form of a gangster drama, the darkly elegant debut feature by James Gray heralded the arrival of a singular voice in contemporary American cinema. Cloaked in the shadows of New York’s underworld, Little Odessa follows Joshua (Tim Roth), a volatile hit man whose latest assignment takes him back to the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. After his return home, his criminal life collides with the grim domestic world of his abusive father (Maximilian Schell), ailing mother (Vanessa Redgrave), and loyal teenage brother (Edward Furlong). Channeling the brooding fatalism of classic noir, Gray—who won the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion at just twenty-five—composes a haunting reflection on violence that begins at home and ripples ever outward.

    DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

    • New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director James Gray, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
    • 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 2000 featuring Gray
    • Once Upon a Time . . . “Little Odessa,” a making-of documentary by David Thompson produced for French television
    • New conversation between Gray and critic and podcaster Sean Fennessey
    • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
    • PLUS: An essay by film critic Glenn Kenny

     

    Eclipse Series 49: Five Radical Documentaries by Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi (Blu-Ray)

    Street Date: August 25, 2026

    Cover of "Five Radical Documentaries by Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi," Eclipse Series 49, listing five film titles with small film stills above the text.Synopsis: Shocking, confrontational, and made with white-hot fury, these radical documentaries—directed by Kazuo Hara and produced by his wife and longtime creative partner, Sachiko Kobayashi—give voice to the outsiders and iconoclasts who wage war against the conformism of modern Japanese society. From a woman willing to risk everything on her journey toward personal and sexual liberation (Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974) to a man whose quest to expose Japanese wartime atrocities borders on madness (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On), the unforgettable subjects of these films are invited to be collaborators in Hara and Kobayashi’s process, resulting in works of unmatched power and immediacy.

    Films In This Set:

    Goodbye CP

    An early documentary to portray the experiences of disabled people with compassion and complexity, Kazuo Hara’s searing debut is also one of the most unflinching films ever made about what it means to be an outsider. Produced in collaboration with the Green Lawn—a group of activists with cerebral palsy—Goodbye CP blends shot-on-the-fly footage of the members’ seemingly Sisyphean struggle to take their message to the streets with raw, sometimes confrontational interviews in which they reveal the torment of living in a society cruelly indifferent to their existence. In making his subjects active participants in the film—a practice he would continue—Hara powerfully asserts the humanity and agency of those who have long been denied both.

    Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

    When his first wife, the outspoken feminist Miyuki Takeda, announced that she was leaving him in order to find herself, Kazuo Hara began this radical documentary as a way both to maintain their complex relationship and to make sense of it. Assisted by his new partner, Sachiko Kobayashi, Hara is granted shockingly intimate access to Takeda’s wayward journey toward liberation, as she explores her sexuality, becomes a single mother, and grows increasingly disenchanted with traditional social structures. As complicated and uncompromising as Takeda herself, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 explodes the boundaries between subject and filmmaker to portray a woman willing to risk everything to live on her own terms.

    The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

    Kazuo Hara’s most renowned film is a harrowing confrontation with one of Japanese history’s darkest chapters. His unforgettable subject and collaborator in The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is Kenzo Okuzaki—a former soldier, convicted murderer, and defiantly antiestablishment agitator—who has made it his life’s mission to expose the crimes committed by Japanese officers against their own men in New Guinea during World War II. As Okuzaki resorts to extreme measures in his crusade to find out the truth, what emerges is at once a shocking piece of investigative journalism, a courageous condemnation of militarism, and a riveting portrait of a single-minded man driven by a raw fury bordering on madness.

    A Dedicated Life

    Kazuo Hara’s interest in iconoclastic figures living in opposition to mainstream society led him to work on A Dedicated Life, a fly-on-the-wall portrait of the controversial novelist Mitsuharu Inoue, a sometimes charming, sometimes combative, often frustrating literary lion of postwar Japan. The project, however, soon spins off into unexpected directions, first when Inoue is diagnosed with terminal cancer, then when Hara discovers that the writer’s fictions extend to the fabricated details of his own life. As the ailing author confronts his mortality, Hara begins trying to separate the man from the myth, resulting in a layered portrait of a complex figure whose life was an extension of his art.

    Sennan Asbestos Disaster

    Made over the course of ten years, this epic work of activist cinema joins the citizens of Sennan, Osaka, as they embark on an uphill legal battle to receive reparations from the government for exposing them to the deadly toxins of the city’s asbestos factories. Through wrenching interviews with the victims, Sennan Asbestos Disaster paints a damning portrait of how decades of negligence exacted a devastating toll while revealing how the tragedy is deeply entwined with issues of class and anti-Korean discrimination. This galvanizing look at the power of collective action depicts what happens when ordinary people go up against an unfeeling, maddeningly slow bureaucracy in their unceasing fight for justice.

    Special Features

    An essay by film scholar Markus Nornes

     

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