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

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

The Criterion Channel has announced its May 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 May streaming titles along with their premiere dates below.

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

The Criterion Channel May 2026 Schedule

May on the Criterion Channel
Streaming May 1

May on the Criterion Channel Includes ’80s REMAKES (AND THEIR ORIGINALS), OFFICE ROMANCES, CARIBBEAN ACTIVIST CINEMA, DAVID CHASE’S ADVENTURES IN MOVIEGOING, CONBODY VS EVERYBODY, and more…

Top Stories
’80s Remakes (and Their Originals!)

As a new generation of movie-mad directors emerged in the 1980s, they drew direct inspiration from the films they grew up watching and obsessing over. The result was a striking run of idiosyncratic Reagan-era remakes in which filmmakers such as John Carpenter (turning the Cold War sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World into a glacial descent into existential terror), Paul Schrader (transforming the shadowy horror landmark Cat People into a hypnotic vision of erotic obsession), and Jim McBride (reimagining Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave bombshell Breathless as a neon-soaked rock ’n’ roll reverie) breathed new life into familiar stories. Viewed side by side, these films reveal a decade in provocative dialogue with the past, infusing timeless originals with the aesthetics, politics, and cultural permissiveness of a new era.

Remakes
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Bob Rafelson, 1981
Cat People, Paul Schrader, 1982
The Thing, John Carpenter, 1982
Breathless, Jim McBride, 1983
The Man Who Loved Women, Blake Edwards, 1983
Against All Odds, Taylor Hackford, 1984
No Way Out, Roger Donaldson, 1987
D.O.A., Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, 1988
We’re No Angels, Neil Jordan, 1989

Originals
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Tay Garnett, 1946
Cat People, Jacques Tourneur, 1942
The Thing from Another World, Christian Nyby, 1951
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960
The Man Who Loved Women, François Truffaut, 1977
Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur, 1947
The Big Clock, John Farrow, 1948
D.O.A., Rudolph Maté, 1949
We’re No Angels, Michael Curtiz, 1955

Office Romances

Beginning in the 1930s, the ever-growing number of working women inspired a new type of romantic comedy, where meet-cutes come amid desks and typewriters, and the course of true love is entangled with office politics and professional rivalry. The genre was tailor-made for stars like Jean Arthur, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell who could dazzle with brainy repartee and make competence sexy. Elements of these films may be quaintly transgressive (boozy office parties! bosses dating their secretaries!), but they also tackle still-timely topics—work-life balance (His Girl Friday), gender equality (Woman of the Year), and even fears of jobs being eliminated by computers (Desk Set)—with crackling comic irreverence, finding laughter and romance in the nine-to-five.

The Office Wife, Lloyd Bacon, 1930
Working Girls, Dorothy Arzner, 1931
Man Wanted, William Dieterle, 1932
The Whole Town’s Talking, John Ford, 1935
More Than a Secretary, Alfred E. Green, 1936
His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks, 1940
Woman of the Year, George Stevens, 1942
Desk Set, Walter Lang, 1957
The Apartment, Billy Wilder, 1960

David Chase’s Adventures in Moviegoing

As a writer-director, producer, and creator of The Sopranos, David Chase has left an indelible imprint on popular culture, revolutionizing the art of television by bringing a boldly cinematic sensibility to the small screen. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he sits down with crime-fiction author Megan Abbott to discuss his formative cinematic experiences—from his early memories of the classic gangster movies that would influence his work to the filmmaker he considers his “first director crush”—as well as the selection of favorites he has chosen to present, including a jazz-inflected crime thriller by Louis Malle (Elevator to the Gallows) and a freewheeling Italian road comedy (Il sorpasso).

L’Atalante, Jean Vigo, 1934
Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle, 1958
Viridiana, Luis Buñuel, 1961
Il sorpasso, Dino Risi, 1962
Lacombe, Lucien, Louis Malle, 1974

You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema

Born from a period of intense political upheaval, these radical Caribbean films spotlight vital stories of workers’ movements, decolonial struggle, and liberation from economic exploitation and violent oppression. Including urgent, on-the-ground accounts of revolutionary movements (Haiti: The Way to Freedom, Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us), dynamic portraits of women on the frontlines of resistance (Women of Suriname, Sweet Sugar Rage), and a one-of-a-kind diasporic musical revue (West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty), they blend agitprop and grassroots pedagogy with living folk traditions to forge a collective counter-cinema built around the fight for freedom.

Guest-curated by Jonathan Ali of Third Horizon Film Festival, who presented a version of this program entitled You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985 at THFF in 2025.

Haiti: The Way to Freedom, Arnold Antonin, 1973
The Terror and the Time, Rupert Roonaraine, 1978
Women of Suriname, At van Praag, 1978
West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, Med Hondo, 1979
Bitter Cane, Ben Dupuy and Kim Ives, 1983
Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us, Carmen Ashhurst, Samori Marksman, and John Douglas, 1983
Sweet Sugar Rage, Harclyde Walcott and Honor Ford-Smith, 1985

Conbody vs Everybody

Filmed over eight years, this five-part documentary series from director Debra Granik combines a remarkable, against-the-odds story of grit, survival, and redemption with an incisive look at the harms of America’s prison industrial complex. After years in and out of prison, former drug dealer turned entrepreneur Coss Marte is determined to take control of his future by building Conbody, a New York City gym with a unique social purpose: to employ formerly incarcerated people like himself in an attempt to combat the high rate of recidivism. As Marte wages an uphill battle against the stigma of incarceration and the realities of a relentlessly gentrifying city where second chances are hard to come by, what emerges is both an inspiring portrait of a man on a mission and a powerful examination of a system that continues to punish people even after they have served their time.

Exclusive Premieres

Magellan
Featuring a new introduction by director Lav Diaz, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers Series

A hypnotic journey engraved in images of staggering beauty and horror, this monumental achievement from acclaimed Filipino auteur Lav Diaz boldly rewrites the imperialist mythmaking of the Age of Discovery. Elegantly minimalist yet overpowering in its scale and impact, Magellan follows the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) as he embarks on his epochal quest to cross the Pacific—a voyage that spirals into zealotry and violence when he attempts to impose Christianity upon the people of the Philippines. Abetted by Bernal’s radically antiheroic portrayal, Diaz composes a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.

Lumière, le cinéma!
Featuring a new introduction by director Thierry Frémaux, part of Criterion’s
Meet the Filmmakers Series

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the surname of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institut Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, le cinéma! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious (re)telling of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

Rediscoveries and Restorations

The Spirit of ’45

Cinematic champion of working-class solidarity Ken Loach (I, Daniel Blake) looks back at the remarkable twentieth-century socialist surge that changed modern Britain forever. Through a vivid mix of interviews and archival footage, Loach brings to life the crucial postwar period that swept Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s insurgent Labour Party into power over Winston Churchill’s Conservative government, inaugurating a sweeping series of reforms—including the nationalization of railways, energy, housing, and health care—that marked the birth of the UK’s welfare state. Connecting the era’s hard-won populist triumphs with their present-day precarity, Loach offers both a stirring celebration of collective power and a sobering reminder of its fragility.

Criterion Collection Editions

Él: Criterion Collection Edition #1289

A newlywed woman discovers that her husband’s charm masks disturbing depths of cruelty and madness in Luis Buñuel’s fascinatingly perverse tale of love gone wrong.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An appreciation by Guillermo del Toro, an interview with Buñuel by writer Jean-Claude Carrière, a video essay on Buñuel, and more.

Woman of the Year: Criterion Collection Edition #867

Newlywed reporters find that love and careers clash in this razor-sharp screwball romance, the first of the iconic pairings between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director George Stevens, George Stevens Jr., and authors Marilyn Ann Moss and Claudia Roth Pierpont; and feature-length documentaries on Stevens and Tracy.

Cat People: Criterion Collection Edition #833

Terror lives in the suggestive shadows of this mood-drenched thriller about a woman haunted by a curse that turns her into a feline killer.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by film historian Gregory Mank, the documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, an interview with director Jacques Tourneur, and more.

His Girl Friday: Criterion Collection Edition #849
Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant play a recently divorced journalist couple brought back together in the newsroom in one of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director Howard Hawks and film scholar David Bordwell, featurettes about Hawks and Russell, a radio adaptation of the film, and more.

Director Spotlights

Directed by Kimi Takesue: Crossings and Encounters

The visually mesmerizing and deeply reflective films of Kimi Takesue traverse genres—including documentary, fiction, and experimental forms—to explore the charged spaces between observer and observed. Often centered on the act of travel, Takesue’s work follows tourists and locals as they navigate shared yet unequal terrain. In evocative shorts and acclaimed features like Where Are You Taking Me?, 95 and 6 to Go, and Onlookers, she turns an unblinking lens on cross-cultural encounters, revealing the subtle tensions, curiosities, and power dynamics that shape how we see and are seen across differences. Through her immersive long takes, Takesue invites audiences into moments of intimacy and unease that continually challenge our assumptions.

Features
Where Are You Taking Me?, 2010
95 and 6 to Go, 2016
Onlookers, 2023

Shorts
Bound, 1995
Rosewater, 1999
Heaven’s Crossroad, 2002
Summer of the Serpent, 2004
E=NYC2, 2005
Suspended, 2009
That Which Once Was, 2011
Looking for Adventure, 2013

Three by the Ross Brothers

Flowing freely between documentary and performance, the richly impressionistic films of brothers Bill and Turner Ross are wonders of regional American filmmaking made according to an unwavering philosophy: to be completely present in the moment and alive to the ecstatic humanity that passes before their camera. Whether capturing the rhythms of life along the Texas-Mexico border (Western), the vibrant tradition of color guard (Contemporary Color), or the bleary-eyed last night in a Las Vegas dive bar (Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets), their films are vital records of a living, breathing Americana that approaches the mythic.

Western, 2015
Contemporary Color, 2016
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, 2020

The Bill Douglas Trilogy

Composed in stark, black-and-white images of working-class poetry that have the elemental power of silent cinema, these three works by Bill Douglas are among the most miraculous achievements of British independent film. Based on Douglas’s own hardscrabble upbringing in a postwar Scottish mining village, the Trilogy traces the coming of age of a boy named Jamie (Stephen Archibald) as he contends with poverty, neglect, and emotional isolation before a life-changing friendship sets him on a new path. Tempering harsh reality with moments of tenderness and unexpected lyricism, Douglas crafts an indelible vision of a soul blossoming in the most unforgiving of circumstances.

My Childhood, 1972
My Ain Folk, 1973
My Way Home, 1978

American Independents

Clockwatchers

Four temp workers stuck in cubicle hell find their friendship tested by the pressures of the capitalist rat race in this brilliantly deadpan satire of corporate malaise.

Anime

K-On! The Movie

Five high school bandmates make music and memories on a life-changing trip to London in this charming, heartfelt ode to friendship and growing up.

Hollywood Hits

Queen Bee

Joan Crawford delivers a ferocious performance in this scorching domestic melodrama as a Southern socialite who rules her friends and family with an iron fist.

Twenty-First-Century Cinema

An Unfinished Film

Reality and fiction blur to dizzying, emotionally gripping effect when a film crew reunites to finish a long-abandoned project—only to be locked down at the start of COVID-19.

Daughter’s Daughter

After a tragedy leaves her guardian of her late daughter’s frozen embryo, a woman must confront both her past and future in this elegantly emotional exploration of motherhood and regret.

Maya, Give Me a Title

The limitless imagination of cinematic dream-spinner Michel Gondry is unleashed in a series of lovingly handmade animated adventures inspired by his daughter’s prompts.

Documentaries

The Shepherd and the Bear

The reintroduction of brown bears into a traditional shepherding community sparks conflict high amid the majestic French Pyrenees in an immersive, folkloric documentary.

Riotsville, U.S.A.

Using training footage of Army-built model towns called “Riotsvilles,” this acclaimed documentary offers a poetic and furious reflection on the rebellions of the 1960s—and the machine that worked to destroy them.

Tokyo Trial
Assembled from over nine hundred reels of archival footage, this monumental documentary from the great Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri) examines the prosecution of Japanese war crimes and the fraught, often elusive pursuit of justice.

House of Cardin

This lively portrait chronicles the rise and global influence of visionary designer Pierre Cardin, whose space-age chic designs propelled fashion into the future.

New Additions to Previous Programs

Premiering May 1 in Stunts!: Point Break

An FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) goes undercover as a surfer to catch a band of bank-robbing wave-chasers in the most ecstatically adrenalized cult classic of the 1990s.

Premiering May 1 in Directed by Sean Baker: Four Letter Words

Sean Baker’s feature debut raises the bar for the indie hangout movie with an acerbic, hilarious portrait of young men unwilling to jettison the raucous immaturity of adolescence.

Complete list of films premiering on the Criterion Channel this month:
95 and 6 to Go, Kimi Takesue, 2016
Against All Odds, Taylor Hackford, 1984
An Unfinished Film, Lou Ye, 2024
The Apartment, Billy Wilder, 1960
The Big Clock, John Farrow, 1948*
Bitter Cane, Ben Dupuy and Kim Ives, 1983
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV, 2020
Bound, Kimi Takesue, 1995
Breathless, Jim McBride, 1983
Cat People, Jacques Tourneur, 1942
Cat People, Paul Schrader, 1982
A Chinese Ghost Story, Ching Siu-tung, 1987
A Chinese Ghost Story II, Ching Siu-tung, 1990
A Chinese Ghost Story III, Ching Siu-tung, 1991
Clockwatchers, Jill Sprecher, 1997
Conbody vs Everybody, Debra Granik 2024
D.O.A., Rudolph Maté, 1949
D.O.A., Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, 1988
Daughter’s Daughter, Huang Xi, 2024
Desk Set, Walter Lang, 1957
E=NYC2, Kimi Takesue, 2005
Él, Luis Buñuel, 1953
Four Letter Words, Sean Baker, 2000
Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us, Carmen Ashhurst, Samori Marksman, and John Douglas, 1983
Haiti: The Way to Freedom, Arnold Antonin, 1973
Heaven’s Crossroad, Kimi Takesue, 2002
His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks, 1940
House of Cardin, P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, 2019
K-On! The Movie, Naoko Yamada, 2011*
Looking for Adventure, Kimi Takesue, 2013
Lumière, le cinéma!, Thierry Frémaux, 2025
Man Wanted, William Dieterle, 1932
The Man Who Loved Women, François Truffaut, 1977
The Man Who Loved Women, Blake Edwards, 1983
Maya, Give Me a Title, Michel Gondry, 2024
More Than a Secretary, Alfred E. Green, 1936
My Ain Folk, Bill Douglas, 1973
My Childhood, Bill Douglas, 1972
My Way Home, Bill Douglas, 1978
No Way Out, Roger Donaldson, 1987
The Office Wife, Lloyd Bacon, 1930
Onlookers, Kimi Takesue, 2023
Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow, 1991
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Tay Garnett, 1946
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Bob Rafelson, 1981
Queen Bee, Ranald MacDougall, 1955
Riotsville, U.S.A., Sierra Pettengill, 2022*
Rosewater, Kimi Takesue, 1999
The Shepherd and the Bear, Max Keegan, 2024
The Spirit of ’45, Ken Loach, 2013
Summer of the Serpent, Kimi Takesue, 2004
Suspended, Kimi Takesue, 2009
Sweet Sugar Rage, Harclyde Walcott and Honor Ford-Smith, 1985
The Terror and the Time, Rupert Roonaraine, 1978
That Which Once Was, Kimi Takesue, 2011
The Thing, John Carpenter, 1982*
The Thing from Another World, Christian Nyby, 1951
Tokyo Trial, Masaki Kobayashi, 1983
We’re No Angels, Michael Curtiz, 1955*
We’re No Angels, Neil Jordan, 1989*
Western, Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV, 2015
Where Are You Taking Me?, Kimi Takesue, 2010
The Whole Town’s Talking, John Ford, 1935
Woman of the Year, George Stevens, 1942
Women of Suriname, At van Praag, 1978
Working Girls, Dorothy Arzner, 1931

*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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