The Criterion Collection – June 2023 Releases Announced

The Criterion Collection has today announced its release line-up for June 2023, which includes: THE RULES OF THE GAME, Jean Renoir‘s merciless critique of French society, TIME BANDITS; Terry Gilliam‘s fantastic odyssey to the limits of the imagination; MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY, the sublime San Francisco–set feature debut of love and connection by Barry Jenkins; and THE SERVANT, Joseph Losey‘s savagely witty British class-war classic; as well as the previously announced PASOLINI 101, a major new 9-film tribute to the Italian iconoclast Pier Paolo Pasolini.

THE RULES OF THE GAME (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray)

Director: Jean Renoir

Release Date: 6 June 2023

1939 • 106 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio 

Considered one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis’s country château lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances. The film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the audience at its 1939 premiere, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II; it wasn’t reconstructed until 1959. That version, which has stunned viewers for decades, is presented here.

TIME BANDITS (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray)

Director: Terry Gilliam

Release Date: 13 June 2023

1981 • 116 minutes • Color • Stereo • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

In this fantastic voyage through time and space from Terry Gilliam, a boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) escapes his gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time travelers. Armed with a map stolen from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson), they plunder treasure from Napoleon (Ian Holm) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery)—but the Evil Genius (David Warner) is watching their every move. Featuring a darkly playful script by Gilliam and his Monty Python cohort Michael Palin (who also appears in the film), Time Bandits is at once a giddy fairy tale, a revisionist history lesson, and a satire of technology gone awry.

THE SERVANT (Blu-ray)

Director: Joseph Losey

Release Date: 20 June 2023

1963 • 115 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio 

The prolific, ever provocative Joseph Losey, blacklisted from Hollywood and living in England, delivered a coolly modernist shock to the system of that nation’s cinema with this mesmerizing dissection of class, sexuality, and power. A dissolute scion of the upper crust (James Fox) finds the seemingly perfect manservant (a diabolical Dirk Bogarde, during his transition from matinee idol to art-house icon) to oversee his new London town house. But not all is as it seems, as traditional social hierarchies are gradually, disturbingly destabilized. Lustrously disorienting cinematography and a masterful script by playwright Harold Pinter merge in The Servant, a tour de force of mounting psychosexual menace.

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY

Director: Barry Jenkins

Release Date: 20 June 2023

2008 • 88 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.78:1 aspect ratio

One of the great debut features of the twenty-first century, Barry Jenkins’s captivating, lo-fi romance Medicine for Melancholy unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco, where a one-night stand between two young bohemians, Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo’ (Tracey Heggins), spins off into a woozy daylong affair marked by moments of tenderness, friction, joy, and intellectual sparring as they explore their relationships to each other, the city, and their own Blackness. Shooting on desaturated video, Jenkins crafts an intimate exploration of alienation and connection graced with the evocative visual palette and empathetic emotional charge that has come to define his work.

PASOLINI 101

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Release Date: 27 June 2023

PASOLINI 101, a major new 9-film tribute to the Italian iconoclast Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the most original and controversial filmmakers of the 20th century, will available in a Special Edition Blu-ray Collector’s Set on 27 June 2023.

Released in celebration of the 101st anniversary of Pasolini’s birth, this collector’s set provides an essential window onto a transformative period for an artist whose legacy remains a wellspring of freedom and revolutionary force.

Including nine provocative, lyrical, often scandal-inducing films from the 1960s — Accattone, Mamma Roma, Love Meetings, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Oedipus Rex, Teorema, Porcile, and Medea — the decade in which this celebrated poet, novelist, and intellectual embarked on a feature filmmaking career, PASOLINI 101 is a monument to the artist’s daring vision of cinema.

NINE-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTOR’S SET FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations of seven films and 2K digital restorations of Teorema and Medea, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks

• Two shorts made by director Pier Paolo Pasolini for anthology films: La ricotta (1963) and The Sequence of the Paper Flower (1969)

• Two documentaries made by Pasolini during his travels

• New program on Pasolini’s visual style as told through his personal writing, narrated by actor Tilda Swinton and writer Rachel Kushner

• Audio commentaries on Accattone and Teorema

• Documentaries on Pasolini’s life and career featuring archival interviews with the director and his close collaborators

• Episode from 1966 of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps

• Interviews with filmmakers and scholars

• Trailers

• New English subtitle translations

• PLUS: Deluxe packaging, including a 100-page book featuring an essay and notes on the films by critic James Quandt, and writings and drawings by Pasolini