Criterion Channel positions Two Prosecutors as essential viewing for serious cinephiles, pairing the drama with Loznitsa's archival documentary The Trial to create a comprehensive examination of Stalinist oppression. This is prestige programming at its finest—art house cinema with historical gravitas.
Sources close to the production note that Loznitsa and Mutu have developed an unusually tight creative partnership over multiple films, which explains why the director specifically sought out the Romanian cinematographer whose work he first admired in Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
Two Prosecutors premiered at Cannes before playing the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival. Janus Films released it in U.S. cinemas earlier in 2026, with Criterion Channel acquiring streaming rights for its June 23 premiere.
With Two Prosecutors landing on Criterion Channel next week, Loznitsa finally gets his Soviet-era thriller into American homes—and given the director's track record of unflinching historical examination, this one's appointment viewing.
Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors is making its way to American living rooms, with the Criterion Channel set to premiere the drama on June 23. The film, which Janus Films released in U.S. cinemas earlier this year, adapts Georgy Demidov's eponymous novel and drops viewers into the Soviet Union during one of history's darkest chapters—1937, at the height of Stalin's Great Purge. The story follows a young local prosecutor and devoted communist who begins questioning his unwavering faith in the regime as political terror consumes everything around him.
It's the kind of material that requires surgical precision from its filmmakers, and Loznitsa clearly understood that when assembling his creative team. The director specifically reached out to Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, whose work he had long admired—particularly on Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Cannes Palme d'Or. In an exclusive clip from a longer "Meet the Filmmaker" interview that Criterion produced with Loznitsa (the full conversation premieres alongside the film), the director explains why Mutu was his first choice for such sensitive material.
"He's a great artist," Loznitsa says of the cinematographer, who was born in what was then the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic—an experience that gave him particular insight into Soviet visual culture and oppression. The two have collaborated on several films together, and Loznitsa details how he and Mutu developed the "visual rules" for Two Prosecutors—essentially a governing aesthetic philosophy for depicting the paranoia, conformity, and terror of Stalin's regime. The approach clearly paid off: Two Prosecutors debuted at Cannes before traveling to the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival.
On Criterion Channel, Two Prosecutors will be paired with Loznitsa's 2018 documentary The Trial, which he assembled from archival footage of an actual Stalinist show trial. Together, they offer viewers a comprehensive look at how the Soviet system weaponized its legal apparatus—making the streaming premiere less a simple film release and more of a curated historical education for American audiences.
