The Criterion Channel April 2026 Schedule: New Movies, Short Films, & Documentaries

New Movies, Short Films, and Documentaries Coming to The Criterion Channel in April 2026

The Criterion Channel has announced its April 2026 lineup, including movies, short films, documentaries, music films, restorations, and exclusive premieres arriving on the streaming service. Want to own something listed below? Purchase The Criterion Collection films here. We’ve compiled the full list of April streaming titles along with their premiere dates below.

Looking for more monthly streaming lineups? Browse FilmBook’s Streaming Release Calendar.

The Criterion Channel April 2026 Schedule

April on the Criterion Channel
Streaming April 1

April on the Criterion Channel Includes CORPORATE THRILLERS, EMILE DE ANTONIO’S COLD WAR COUNTERCULTURE, OUT-OF-PRINT COLLECTION EDITIONS, MARY BRONSTEIN’S ADVENTURES IN MOVIEGOING, TRANS FILMMAKERS, and more…

Top Stories
Corporate Thrillers

Scandal, corruption, and high-stakes power struggles play out amid imposing high-rises and glassy boardrooms in these sleekly tailored tales of office intrigue and money-hungry machinations. In the years between 1987’s Black Monday stock-market crash and 2008’s global financial meltdown, Wall Street, white-shoe law firms, and Fortune 500 companies held a special fascination for Hollywood. In these poisonous portraits of “greed is good” excess (Wall Street, Arbitrage), morally shaded legal dramas (Primal Fear, The Devil’s Advocate), and globe-trotting conspiracy thrillers (Antitrust, The International), competing ambitions, ruthless backstabbing, and murky ethical politics rise to the realm of the Shakespearean.

Wall Street, Oliver Stone, 1987
The Firm, Sydney Pollack, 1993
Disclosure, Barry Levinson, 1994
Primal Fear, Gregory Hoblit, 1996
The Devil’s Advocate, Taylor Hackford, 1997
Antitrust, Peter Howitt, 2001
The Deal, Harvey Kahn, 2005
Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy, 2007
The International, Tom Tykwer, 2009
Arbitrage, Nicholas Jarecki, 2012

COMING JUNE 1
The Game, David Fincher, 1997
Out-of-Print Criterion Collection Editions
Collectors rejoice! Not every film the Criterion Collection has released over the last four decades remains in print. Formats change, licenses expire, and catalogues evolve. But here on the Channel, we’re thrilled to showcase some of the special editions we once released on LaserDisc, DVD, and Blu-ray, along with the supplements that accompanied them. Among the first featured titles in this new ongoing series, you’ll find Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi masterpiece RoboCop, the all-time classic western High Noon, and the monster-movie landmark King Kong—featuring the first commentary track ever recorded.

King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933
High Noon, Fred Zinnemann, 1952
Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges, 1955
Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby, 1971
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roeg, 1976
The Elephant Man, David Lynch, 1980
RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven, 1987
Mary Bronstein’s Adventures in Moviegoing

Following her blistering debut feature, Yeast (featuring a breakthrough performance by a young Greta Gerwig), Mary Bronstein directed Rose Byrne to an Academy Award nomination in her emotionally stunning maternal maelstrom If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, Bronstein sits down with Aliza Ma, head of programming for the Criterion Channel, to talk about her love of movies, from her early infatuation with Hollywood legends like Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe, whose blend of star power and fragility fascinated her, to discovering the possibilities of indie filmmaking through directors such as Richard Linklater and Todd Solondz. The films she has chosen to present—including Shirley Clarke’s vérité landmark Portrait of Jason, George A. Romero’s horror bombshell Night of the Living Dead, and Susan Seidelman’s punk classic Smithereens—reflect the same uncompromising DIY ethos she has brought to her own work.

Portrait of Jason, Shirley Clarke, 1967
Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, 1968
News from Home, Chantal Akerman, 1976
Smithereens, Susan Seidelman, 1982
Frownland, Ronald Bronstein, 2007
Tramps, Troublemakers, and Trailblazers: Trans Filmmakers

Boundary-breaking filmmakers reclaim their stories with these richly varied looks at the trans experience. Long misrepresented on-screen through disreputable and actively harmful images, trans characters have come into focus thanks to a pioneering generation of trans directors determined to capture their lives with nuance and hard-won insight. Curated by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay, authors of the book Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, these revealing counterhistories of cultural trailblazers (Rupert Remembers, No Ordinary Man), intersectional portraits of everyday survival (Drunktown’s Finest, Lingua Franca), and bold explorations of identity in the online age (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps) show that there is no single, common trans film image but rather a kaleidoscope of voices, forms, and lived realities.
Features
Maggots and Men, Cary Cronenwett, 2009
Drunktown’s Finest, Sydney Freeland, 2014
So Pretty, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, 2019
Lingua Franca, Isabel Sandoval, 2019
No Ordinary Man, Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt, 2020
We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, Jane Schoenbrun, 2021
Dog Movie, Henry Hanson, 2023
Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps, Louise Weard, 2024
Queens of Drama, Alexis Langlois, 2024
Shorts
Gender Troublemakers, Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa Mackay, 1993
Rupert Remembers, Xanthra Phillippa Mackay, 2000
Exclusive Premieres
Resurrection
Featuring a new introduction by director Bi Gan, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers Series

With his ravishing third feature, visionary director Bi Gan takes his deepest plunge yet into the realm of pure dreamscape. In a world where humans have forsaken dreams in exchange for immortality, a dreaming monster (Jackson Yee) embarks on a shape-shifting odyssey through illusion, beauty, and terror that takes him across a century of cinema and to the end of time. Unfolding in five dazzlingly imagined chapters that encompass everything from silent-era expressionism to film noir to a delirious vampire love story shot in one of Bi’s signature long takes, Resurrection is a work of breathtaking imagination in which cinema is the ultimate portal to the unconscious mind.

Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By
An epic, lyrical ode to amateur filmmakers who raise the quotidian to the highest levels of art, Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By is a personal and historical exploration of the home movie in all its unvarnished glory. Upon inheriting an enormous collection of amateur films, André Bonzel (codirector of Man Bites Dog) incorporated the work of complete strangers into a narrated montage of his own family’s century-long moving-image scrapbook. In tracing his own conflation of sex and cinema through his family history, Bonzel plumbs his—as well as hundreds of others’—attempts to both preserve and reshape reality on celluloid, while in the process uncovering buried secrets, forgotten legacies, and some of the deepest motivations for capturing fleeting, everyday moments through the magic of a camera.

Rediscoveries and Restorations
Stella Dallas
One of the silent era’s most popular and moving melodramas, the beautifully mounted original screen version of Olive Higgins Prouty’s oft-filmed novel was adapted by Frances Marion and produced by Samuel Goldwyn. An extraordinarily touching Belle Bennett stars as the everywoman heroine Stella, a small-town girl who moves up in the world when she marries the upper-crust Stephen Dallas (Ronald Colman), with whom she soon has a daughter. But a blue-blood marriage can’t change Stella’s coarse ways, leading to a wrenching choice between her daughter’s happiness and her own.

Criterion Collection Editions
Return to Reason—Four Films by Man Ray: Criterion Collection Edition #1291
Cryptic narrative, dark eroticism, and playful abstraction come together in the swirling surrealist dreams of an avant-garde visionary.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Scores by the avant-rock band SQÜRL; an interview with its members, Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan; and more.
Director Spotlights
Three Noirs by Jacques Tourneur

A master of mood, shadow, and dreamy ambiguity, French-born director Jacques Tourneur brought a sophisticated subtlety to his celebrated work in Hollywood. His command of atmosphere and darkly poetic sensibility were particularly suited to film noir, as seen in this trio of stylish, chiaroscuro-engraved favorites, including the stone-cold classic Out of the Past, a reverie of romantic doom starring genre icon Robert Mitchum in one of his definitive roles.

Out of the Past, 1947
Berlin Express, 1948
Nightfall, 1956
Emile de Antonio’s Cold War Counterculture

A self-described “Marxist among capitalists,” documentarian Emile de Antonio wielded the camera as a weapon in his fight against America’s corrupt power structures and the Cold War establishment elite. Unabashedly aligning himself with the leftist movements of the 1960s and ’70s in contrast to the “objective” style of the then-dominant cinema verité movement, he made his films with raw, blunt force, deploying impactfully edited archival footage to examine everything from the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Rush to Judgment) to the horror of America’s war in Vietnam (In the Year of the Pig) to the radical ideology of the Weather Underground (Underground). Stark, uncompromising, and timely, de Antonio’s films question everything, digging into official narratives to reveal the hidden agendas and systemic rot lurking below.

Point of Order!, 1964
Rush to Judgment, 1967
In the Year of the Pig, 1968
Millhouse, 1971
Painters Painting, 1972
Underground, 1976
In the King of Prussia, 1983
Mr. Hoover and I, 1989

American Independents
Yeast
A girls’ trip goes to hell in this defiantly raw, warts-and-all portrait of toxic friendship from the director of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. A young Greta Gerwig stars, with Josh and Benny Safdie in supporting roles.

Anime
Gatchaman: The Movie
Fans of classic anime will delight in this awesomely retro sci-fi extravaganza teeming with pop-psychedelic visuals and whiz-bang-pow action.

Documentaries
Jane by Charlotte
See actor, musician, and fashion icon Jane Birkin as never before: through the intimate, revealing lens of her daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Short Films
Prismatic Ground Presents

One of the most exciting and adventurous film festivals to emerge in recent years, Prismatic Ground brings together aesthetically innovative, politically radical work at the intersection of experimental and documentary cinema. This selection of shorts from the festival’s first five editions offers an eclectic cross section of vital works by filmmakers whose approach to image-making eschews traditional narrative in favor of abstraction and sensation, showing how avant-garde techniques can be deployed to illuminate profound personal experiences as well as violent histories of colonialism, oppression, and dispossession. The latest additions from the festival’s 2025 edition confront topics as varied as class, labor, family, memory, landscape, history, consciousness, and resistance with rigorous attention to form and galvanizing emotional power. The sixth edition of Prismatic Ground runs from April 29–May 3, 2026.

Newly Added Shorts
Kalighat Fetish, Ashish Avikunthak, 1999
Buseok, Kyujae Park, 2024
endings, Philip Hoffman and Isiah Medina, 2024
Hemel, Danielle Dean, 2024
typhoon diary 风球日记, Helix Zhang, 2024
Winter Portrait, Fernando Saldivia Yáñez, 2024
Concrete Resources (Thank you for keeping me a company of images), Emir West, 2024
All Said Done, Micah Weber, 2025
Remote Views, Alexis McCrimmon, 2025
Tuktuit, Lindsay McIntyre, 2025

Short Films by Sophy Romvari
With her acclaimed debut feature, the heartbreaking family portrait Blue Heron (in theaters this April), Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari builds on her early short works to reveal an astonishing cinematic sensibility exquisitely attuned to the delicate, sensory details that shape experience. Frequently incorporating her own family’s history and photographs, these intimate, essayistic shorts—including Still Processing, a cathartic precursor to Blue Heron—muse on memory, grief, femininity, and the human-animal bond, often with touching vulnerability. Following in the self-reflexive footsteps of filmmakers like Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman while evincing a modern generational sensibility all her own, they find a major artist in the process of forging her singular voice.

Nine Behind, 2016
It’s Him, 2017
Pumpkin Movie, 2017
Grandma’s House, 2018
Norman Norman, 2018
In Dog Years, 2019
Remembrance of József Romvári, 2020
Still Processing, 2020
The Water Murmurs
Winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or for Best Short Film, this dreamily poetic vision of aqueous apocalypse is a mesmerizing meditation on the fragility of both human connection and life on Earth.
Music Films
Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr.
Discover the behind-the-scenes story of the turbulent creative partnership that fueled the ferocious sound of one of the most influential rock bands of all time.
Tokyo Melody: A Film About Ryuichi Sakamoto
Experience time, music, and Tokyo through the eyes and ears of visionary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto with this collage-like immersion into his world.
Twenty-First-Century Cinema
Stranger Eyes
A couple is drawn into a disturbing mystery when they begin receiving DVDs containing footage of their own lives in this gripping surveillance thriller for the digital age.
New Additions to Previous Programs
Premiering April 1 in Surreal Nature Documentaries: Grasshopper Republic
This strangely beautiful nature documentary with a science-fiction twist immerses the viewer into the world of Ugandan grasshopper hunters.
Complete list of films premiering on the Criterion Channel this month:
All Said Done, Micah Weber, 2025
Antitrust, Peter Howitt, 2001
Arbitrage, Nicholas Jarecki, 2012*
Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges, 1955*
Berlin Express, Jacques Tourneur, 1948
Buseok, Kyujae Park, 2024
Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps, Louise Weard, 2024
Concrete Resources (Thank you for keeping me a company of images), Emir West, 2024
The Deal, Harvey Kahn, 2005
The Devil’s Advocate, Taylor Hackford, 1997
Disclosure, Barry Levinson, 1994
Dog Movie, Henry Hanson, 2023
Drunktown’s Finest, Sydney Freeland, 2014
The Elephant Man, David Lynch, 1980
endings, Philip Hoffman and Isiah Medina, 2024
The Firm, Sydney Pollack, 1993*
Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By, André Bonzel, 2021
Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr., Philipp Virus, 2021
Gatchaman: The Movie, Hisayuki Toriumi, 1978*
Gender Troublemakers, Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa Mackay, 1993
Grandma’s House, Sophy Romvari, 2018
Grasshopper Republic, Daniel McCabe, 2023
Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby, 1971
Hemel, Danielle Dean, 2024
High Noon, Fred Zinnemann, 1952
In Dog Years, Sophy Romvari, 2019
The International, Tom Tykwer, 2009
In the King of Prussia, Emile de Antonio, 1983
In the Year of the Pig, Emile de Antonio, 1968
It’s Him, Sophy Romvari, 2017
Jane by Charlotte, Charlotte Gainsbourg, 2021
Kalighat Fetish, Ashish Avikunthak, 1999
King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933
Lingua Franca, Isabel Sandoval, 2019
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roeg, 1976
Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy, 2007
Millhouse, Emile de Antonio, 1971
Mr. Hoover and I, Emile de Antonio, 1989
Nightfall, Jacques Tourneur, 1956
Nine Behind, Sophy Romvari, 2016
No Ordinary Man, Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt, 2020
Norman Norman, Sophy Romvari, 2018
Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur, 1947
Painters Painting, Emile de Antonio, 1972
Point of Order!, Emile de Antonio, 1964
Primal Fear, Gregory Hoblit, 1996*
Pumpkin Movie, Sophy Romvari, 2017
Queens of Drama, Alexis Langlois, 2024
Remembrance of József Romvári, Sophy Romvari, 2020
Remote Views, Alexis McCrimmon, 2025
Return to Reason, Man Ray, 2023
RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven, 1987
Rupert Remembers, Xanthra Phillippa Mackay, 2000
Rush to Judgment, Emile de Antonio, 1967
So Pretty, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, 2019
Still Processing, Sophy Romvari, 2020
Stranger Eyes, Yeo Siew Hua, 2024
Tokyo Melody: A Film About Ryuichi Sakamoto, Elizabeth Lennard, 1985
Tuktuit, Lindsay McIntyre, 2025
typhoon diary 风球日记, Helix Zhang, 2024
Underground, Haskell Wexler, Emile de Antonio, and Mary Lampson, 1976
Wall Street, Oliver Stone, 1987
The Water Murmurs, Story Chen, 2022
Winter Portrait, Fernando Saldivia Yáñez, 2024
Yeast, Mary Bronstein, 2008

*Available in the U.S. only

On Criterion

Since 1984, the Criterion Collection has been dedicated to publishing important classic and contemporary films from around the world in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements. No matter the medium—from laserdisc to DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra HD to streaming on the Criterion Channel—Criterion has maintained its pioneering commitment to presenting each film as its maker would want it seen, in state-of-the-art restorations with special features designed to encourage repeated watching and deepen the viewer’s appreciation of the art of film.

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