Little Odessa, Harlan County USA, 12 Angry Men & Days and Nights in the Forest from Criterion UK in September
Spirit Entertainment has announced the Criterion Collection UK releases for September 2026, which will consist of Dostoevskian family tragedy Little Odessa, Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning documentary Harlan County USA, Sidney Lumet’s searing jury room drama 12 Angry Men, and Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest.
LITTLE ODESSA (USA 1994)
4K UHD + Blu-ray | 7 September 2026
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 neighbourhood 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).
Channelling 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
- New cover by Michael Boland
HARLAN COUNTY USA (USA 1976)
Blu-ray | 7 September 2026
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.
You can read our review of the previous Criterion DVD here.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Barbara Kopple, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- 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
- Essays by film critic Michael Atkinson and musician and writer Jon Weisberger
- Cover by Eric Skillman
12 ANGRY MEN (USA 1957)
4K UHD + Blu-ray | 14 September 2026
12 Angry Men, directed by Sidney Lumet, may be the most radical courtroom drama in cinema history. A behind-closed-doors look at the American legal system that is as riveting as it is spare, this iconic adaptation of Reginald Rose’s teleplay stars Henry Fonda as the dissenting member on a jury of white men ready to pass judgement on a Puerto Rican teenager charged with murdering his father. The result is a saga of epic proportions that plays out over a tense afternoon in one sweltering room.
Lumet’s electrifying snapshot of 1950s America on the verge of change is one of the great feature-film debuts.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, 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
- Television version from 1954 of 12 Angry Men, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner for the series Studio One, with an introduction by Ron Simon, curator at the Paley Center for Media
- Production history of 12 Angry Men, from teleplay to big-screen classic
- Archival interviews with director Sidney Lumet
- Interview with screenwriter Walter Bernstein about Lumet
- Interview with Simon about writer Reginald Rose
- Tragedy in a Temporary Town (1956), a teleplay directed by Lumet and written by Rose
- Interview with cinematographer John Bailey about director of photography Boris Kaufman
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- An essay by writer and law professor Thane Rosenbaum
- Cover by Sean Phillips
DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST [ARANYER DIN RATRI] (India 1970)
4K UHD + Blu-ray | 28 September 2026
One of director Satyajit Ray’s greatest achievements begins with the deceptively easy grace of a buddy comedy – only to give way to darker moral shading.
Seeking a weekend escape from the city, four friends from Kolkata embark on a driving trip to the countryside, where their urban entitlement and prejudices are gradually exposed. Among these young bachelors is the overconfident Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), who finds his self-assurance shaken by Aparna (the radiant Sharmila Tagore), an enigmatic young woman whose cool intellect conceals turbulent emotional depths.
Filmed luminously amid the sound-dappled splendour of the woodlands of India’s Palamu region, Days and Nights in the Forest deconstructs the masculine ego and India’s fraught class divisions with elegant complexity.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration – undertaken by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Film Heritage Foundation, Janus Films, and the Criterion Collection – with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Introduction by filmmaker Wes Anderson
- Making-of program featuring new and archival interviews with director Satyajit Ray, actors Sharmila Tagore and Rabi Ghosh, and cinematographer Soumendu Roy
- Conversation about Ray and the film’s restoration featuring Anderson, Tagore, and Film Heritage Foundation founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- An essay by film critic Devika Girish