A new month means new features, shorts, and collections on The Criterion Channel. May is the gracious host of Mother’s Day, and so there are many films to honor that occasion. There are also films honoring acclaimed actors (such as Ida Lupino) and directors (such as Richard Linklater). Here are seven that should not be missed.

Boyhood (2014)

Available: May 1st

Directed by: Richard Linklater

Written by: Richard Linklater

Cast: Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke

One of this month’s collections is dedicated to Richard Linklater, the celebrated director from a class of Gen X auteurs who made personal films that happened to also be conventionally entertaining. Some of his best movies will not be on the Criterion Channel (no Dazed and Confused or Everybody Wants Some!!). Some of his best movies will be on the Criterion Channel, but not until this summer (his excellent Before trilogy of romances won’t be available until July 1st). Luckily, he’s directed a lot of good movies, and May’s options include Boyhood.

Famously filmed off and on for over a decade, Boyhood is a great showcase for both Patricia Arquette and her director. It chronicles the lives of its characters, but also the actors’ inhabiting of those characters. It also chronicles the directors’ refinement of skill over the course of those years. Production began in 2002, so Linklater was not exactly a freshman artist, and the opening section of the movie feels like a piece over which he has complete control, despite his having no real control over where his narrative would spiral. (What if something happened to one of his actors? What if one round of filming produced unusable footage?) Like TV shows with many-season runs, part of the fun is watching human beings (and their characters) grow and age onscreen. Boyhood is one of the only contained-narrative films capable of offering that experience.

The Last Waltz (1978)

Available: May 1st

Directed by: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel

The Last Waltz is a concert film starring The Band. Who’s The Band? They’re post-Bob Dylan roots-rock outfit who helped write the classic rock playbook. This documentary of their “final” concert is often considered the high-watermark of concert filmmaking. Filmed on Thanksgiving Day in San Francisco in 1976, the film is a lively run-through of The Band’s catalog (up to that point), interspersed with interview footage and photography of its host city. Martin Scorsese seems to innately understand how to shoot these musicians to look as cool as possible, pre-MTV. Shot on film (naturally), there is the photographic warmth the director is known for. His eye elevates shots of not just the artists who bless the stage, but the metropolitan decay of San Francisco in the late 1970s. The Band is joined by Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, and more, making it also a mind-boggling opportunity to see many artists of historical talent cranking out influential music like it’s not a big deal.

Smooth Talk (1985)

Available: February 1st

Directed by: Joyce Chopra

Written by: Tom Cole (Screenplay), Joyce Carol Oates (Novel)

Cast: Treat Williams, Laura Dern, Mary Kay Place, Elizabeth Berridge, Levon Helm

In a collection entitled "Films of Endearment," critic Michael Koresky creates a Mother’s Day-inspired list of films from the 1980s. These films highlight female leads. The idea is to do a bit of cultural counter-programming of that era’s movies, the most-celebrated of which tend to be more testosterone-driven. We’re picking two of these. The first, Smooth Talk, was originally a television movie, though it would go on to be nominated for a Best Director prize at the 1985 Independent Spirit Awards. Based on an allegorical short-story by author Joyce Carol Oates, Smooth Talk stars Laura Dern as a teenager anxious for romantic entanglement, and who finds it, for better or worse, in the aloof menace of a James Dean try-hard named Arnold. We never learn what happens between them, but the implications of their encounter are meant to be read in how Connie (Dern) changes as a person from the film’s start to its conclusion. Remastered in 4K by Criterion, it’s another entry in the Dern filmography of suburban dysfunction, as well as an interesting psychological drama, and a nice way into Oates’s work.

Something Wild (1986)

Available: May 1st

Directed by: Jonathan Demme

Written by: E. Max Frye

Cast: Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels, Ray Liotta

Another from the Mother’s Day collection, this one is on the (mostly) lighter side. Something Wild starts out as a romantic comedy (kind of). Charles, a man of the “yuppie” cinematic archetype (Jeff Daniels), accepts a ride home from Lulu, a woman of the “free spirit” character mold (Melanie Griffith). But Lulu does not take him home. She takes him on a road trip involving sex, crime, and meeting her mother. When he’s tasked with posing as her husband at her high-school reunion, and a dangerous Ray Liotta shows up, the film flips from comedy to thriller. The film’s director would go on to direct both Married to the Mob and The Silence of the Lambs, and his ability to juggle disparate tones is employed here well, with perhaps the specificity of the screenplay being the MVP, keeping things afloat. Which is to say that the comedic bits are leaned into with screwball abandon, but the switch to tenser material is not treated like a shade of farce, but a bloody, suspenseful new level of Charles’s gonzo odyssey, one he must fight to get through in one piece.

True Mothers (2020)

Available: May 4th

Directed by: Naomi Kawase

Written by: Izumi Takahashi

Cast: Arata Iura, Aju Makita, Miyoko Asada

True Mothers is slow-burn family drama from Japan, having had its global debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2020. It tells the story of a young couple who cannot conceive and so adopt a son. The idea only comes to them after seeing a television ad for a special facility that houses pregnant women who do not want their impending children. Many of them are trafficked, or runaways, or otherwise abandoned. But their son is great, and they love him. After six years with him, a woman arrives at the couple’s home, claiming to be their son’s birth mother. But this woman says a lot of the wrong things, and soon after their initial meeting, the parents start to suspect that she is not who she says she is. It is an inherently compelling premise, in service of a character-focused movie that has many plot pivots up its sleeve, with its indebtedness being to drama more than genre.

The Parallax View (1974)

Available: May 1st

Directed by: Alan J. Pakula

Written by: David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr., Robert Towne, Loren Singer

Cast: Warren Beatty, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels, Paula Prentiss

Alan J. Pakula is a director of famous works who lacks a famous name himself. All the President’s Men and Sophie’s Choice are among his most recognized titles, with the former being part of his “paranoia trilogy” of thrillers. That trilogy also includes neo-noir crime story Klute (1971), and political conspiracy thriller The Parallax View.

Parallax stars Warren Beatty as a defiant journalist investigating a mystery. A senator has been killed at the Space Needle in Seattle, and every witness to this crime—a group that includes his occasional love interest—is being murdered. The world seems to be treating this like business as usual, but this journalist wants answers, and this journey sends him, and the audience, down a rabbit hole of shady corporations, amoral politics, and psychological warfare. A remastered 70s thriller shot on film is always going to look great, and Pakula’s steady, matter-of-fact style of shooting and editing makes this a great opportunity to see an artfully composed—and somewhat unsung—film from a moment in Hollywood when artful major studio dramas were released at a reliable rate. Which means not all of them have gotten their due.

Time Bandits (1984)

Available: May 21st

Directed by: Terry Gilliam

Written by: Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin

Cast: John Cleese, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm

Terry Gilliam made and released Time Bandits before the release of The NeverEnding Story, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Return of the Jedi, or Fraggle Rock. Meaning, he released a wildly imaginative, endearingly preposterous, science-fantasy motion picture, aimed at kids, before it was proven that such a thing would do business. It stars a boy who teams up with a group of dwarves to travel through time, meeting many historical figures, disturbing creatures, and an antagonist named simply Evil Genius. The thing is shown from the height of a kid, with the camera looking up at the adults—allowing the dwarves to stand as our hero’s peers. Apple TV Plus is making a series out of this, and so this is a chance to get in before the potential hype, and enjoy one of the great family fantasy adventures of the past.