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Criterion Collection May 2026 Releases

By Lio Renwick
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Criterion May 2026 Releases

The Criterion Collection is releasing seven titles in May, spanning new restorations, director-approved transfers, and a Criterion Premieres entry. The lineup includes 4K UHD editions of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949), Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981), Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value, and Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974), alongside Blu-ray releases of Ira Sachs' The Delta (1998) and Shu Lea Cheang's Fresh Kill (1994). Peter Hujar's Day, also from Sachs, arrives under the Criterion Premieres line.

Four of the seven releases arrive on 4K UHD with accompanying Blu-ray discs. Stray Dog features a new 4K digital restoration with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. Body Heat includes a new 4K digital restoration with Dolby Vision HDR, supervised by editor Carol Littleton and approved by director Lawrence Kasdan. Sentimental Value features a new 4K digital master approved by director Joachim Trier with a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. Lenny receives a new 4K digital restoration presented in Dolby Vision HDR with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack.

The three Blu-ray releases round out the slate. Peter Hujar's Day arrives under the Criterion Premieres line with a Criterion Channel interview and notes by Michael Koresky. The Delta features a new 2K digital restoration supervised and approved by director Ira Sachs. Fresh Kill includes a new 4K restoration supervised and approved by director Shu Lea Cheang and director of photography Jane Castle, with a 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack.

Stray Dog arrives first on May 5, 2026, followed by Peter Hujar's Day and The Delta on May 12, 2026. Fresh Kill and Body Heat release on May 19, 2026, with Sentimental Value and Lenny closing out the month on May 26, 2026.

Full release details are below.

Stray Dog Criterion Collection

Stray Dog (1949)

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo's sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. With each step, cop's and criminal's lives become more intertwined and the investigation becomes an examination of Murakami's own dark side. Starring Toshiro Mifune as the rookie cop and Takashi Shimura as the seasoned detective who keeps him on the right side of the law, Stray Dog goes beyond crime thriller, probing the squalid world of postwar Japan and the nature of the criminal mind.

Special Features

Peter Hujars Day Criterion Premieres

Peter Hujar's Day

A loving snapshot of a vanished New York, director Ira Sachs's captivating cultural time capsule is a warm, witty, graceful re-creation of a real-life conversation that took place between photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) in 1974. Peter Hujar's Day eavesdrops on the two friends' leisurely, affectionate hangout as Hujar recounts his previous day's activities, offering insights into both his art and his everyday life. What emerges is a touching celebration of creativity, connection, and simply being present, made exceptionally vivid by Sachs's cinematic flourishes and wonderfully tender performances from Whishaw and Hall, whose chemistry gives the film its heart and soul.

Releasing under the Criterion Premieres line. Available May 12, 2026.

Special Features

The Delta Criterion Collection

The Delta (1998)

The complexities of race, class, and sexuality collide within a Memphis community in the strikingly raw debut feature from director Ira Sachs. With neorealist immediacy, The Delta tells what at first appears to be a simple love story: two young men, Lincoln (Shayne Gray), a closeted white teenager, and Minh (Thang Chan), a Black Vietnamese immigrant, meet at a cruising spot and embark on a nighttime journey by boat down the Mississippi River. But soon, imbalances of power and privilege emerge between them, as the film develops into a devastating vision of lost, wounded souls reaching out in the dark for human connection.

Special Features

Fresh Kill Criterion Collection

Fresh Kill (1994)

A disturbingly prescient ecofeminist parable and a brain-wave-scrambling cyberpunk fantasia, the debut feature from new-media pioneer Shu Lea Cheang merges a bold vision of resistance with an exuberant early-internet aesthetic. In a dystopian-chic New York where sushi joints and toxic-waste sites exist side by side, a lesbian couple (Sarita Choudhury and Erin McMurtry) turn to the hacker underground to solve their daughter's disappearance, in the process exposing a conspiracy involving corporate greenwashing and tainted fish. Swinging between outré satire and agitprop, Fresh Kill sounds the alarm about a capitalist system that pollutes everything from our waterways to our bodies to our minds.

Special Features

Body Heat Criterion Collection

Body Heat (1981)

With his debut feature, acclaimed writer-director Lawrence Kasdan brilliantly updated the conventions of 1940s film noir for the 1980s, resulting in one of the steamiest and most influential erotic thrillers ever made. On the sultry South Florida coast, lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt) is drawn into a torrid affair with unhappily married housewife Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner, in a star-making performance), and it's not long before they've hatched a scheme to murder her wealthy husband. Featuring ingenious plot twists, memorable hard-boiled dialogue, and an atmosphere so evocative you can practically feel the humidity, Body Heat is a languorously seductive tale of greed and desire, one that paved a new path for American crime cinema.

Special Features

Sentimental Value Criterion Collection

Sentimental Value

Joachim Trier, one of contemporary cinema's great humanists, excavates layers of history and memory, both national and personal, for this rich, ineffably moving story of one family's attempts to come to terms with generations of trauma and healing. After the death of their mother, two sisters must contend with the return home to Norway of their estranged father, celebrated filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård). In the case of Nora (Renate Reinsve), an actor, he hopes to reconnect by casting her in his new film, a project that both inflicts fresh wounds and reopens old ones. With a virtuoso ensemble cast that also includes Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (in a breakout performance) and Elle Fanning, Trier's film delicately balances each moment of humor and hurt, conducting a stunning emotional exploration of how the past echoes in the present and art can transform pain into catharsis.

Special Features

Lenny Criterion Collection

Lenny (1974)

Director Bob Fosse's nervy, freewheeling showbiz drama tells the real-life story of taboo-shattering comedian Lenny Bruce, the counterculture prophet whose unfiltered style opened up new frontiers in self-expression. Dustin Hoffman brings a live-wire intensity to his portrayal of the motormouthed Bruce as he goes from small-time strip-club emcee to free-speech lightning rod, while Valerie Perrine lends the film its soul with her deeply affecting performance as his wife, Honey, an innocent lost on the dark side of bohemia. A complex portrayal of one iconoclast by another, Fosse's film makes deft use of stark monochrome photography and kinetic editing to vividly capture Bruce's smoky, seedy backstage world.

Special Features

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