Each month, Paste brings you a look at the best new selections from the Criterion Collection. Much beloved by casual fans and cinephiles alike, Criterion has presented special editions of important classic and contemporary films for over three decades. You can explore the complete collection here.
In the meantime, because chances are you may be looking for something, anything, to discover, find all of our Criterion picks here, and if you’d rather dig into things on the streaming side (because who’s got the money to invest in all these beautiful physical editions?) we’ve got our list of the best films on the Criterion Channel. But you’re here for what’s new, and we’ve got you covered.
Here are all the new releases from Criterion, June 2023:
The Rules of the GameYear: 1939
Director: Jean Renoir
Stars: Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély, Marcel Dalio, Julien Carette, Roland Toutain, Gaston Modot, Pierre Magnier, Jean Renoir
Rating: NR
Runtime: 106 minutes
When Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir’s angry satire against the disregard and contempt the bourgeoisie displays for the working class, was first shown to an audience, a man who heard of the film’s supposed communist message tried to light a fire. Later, Renoir said that if someone is willing to burn down a theater to destroy your work, you must have done something right. Renoir brilliantly hid his brutally honest takedown of ruling class sociopathy under a thin veneer of a soap opera romance between the rich. Under this gaudy gold-plated surface of civilized behavior, expensive dinners and manly quail hunts, lies a moral rot that abandons all human dignity in favor of crude hedonism. If you’re looking for an artistic guide to understanding how we got to this abysmal point of income inequality, look no further. —Oktay Ege Kozak
The ServantYear: 1963
Director: Joseph Losey
Stars: Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles, Wendy Craig, James Fox
Rating: NR
Runtime: 116 minutes
A class collision hellbent on dragging its entitled rich boy down into the hedonistic gutter, The Servant is a sexy, unsettling thriller of loosely held identities. That could mean sexual identity: Dirk Bogarde’s handsome manservant Barrett has a physical, tightly-framed tension with James Fox’s posh snot Tony, and a certain jealous venom is spit between Barrett and Tony’s fiancée Susan (Wendy Craig). It could also mean personal identity: As the psychological drama descends into its darkest corners, boozehound Tony and grifter Barrett engage in a battle of willpower, grappling for control over the easy life. Joseph Losey’s sharp, chilly direction stabs like an icicle, though it can all melt in an instant thanks to Douglas Slocombe’s steamy compositions and John Dankworth’s rollicking score. The Servant‘s melodramatic plotting may not entirely convince, but the committed and increasingly desperate performances arm the satire to the teeth—and the arsenal deploys every megaton at its disposal. A vicious manslaughter of Britain’s stiff-lipped upper crust, with no sign of forced entry, meaning it was likely committed by a loved one.—Jacob Oller
AccattoneYear: 1961
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Silvana Corsini
Rating: NR
Runtime: 117 minutes
Accattone opens with a quote from Dante’s Purgatorio, the middle journey of The Divine Comedy from Inferno to Paradiso. Accattone is also caught between worlds. A pimp and a father, he has trouble making ends meet. A dejected member of society, Accattone has trouble motivating himself, even when he is able to land a job at a factory. Trapped in this world between death and living, Accattone’s tragic fate feels predestined. Pasolini was 39 when he made Accattone, his first film. Already a celebrated literary figure, having written several novels, short stories, plays and screenplays (notably parts of La Dolce Vita and Nights of Cabiria for countryman Frederico Fellini), Pasolini was also between artistic worlds. Watching Accattone today, it feels like a near-textbook work of Italian neorealism. It is full of close, steady, verite shots that define the cinematic mode along with classic subjects like poverty, sex work and failing social systems. Yet there’s something else working from the periphery that reveres the characters. They are filmed in light. At times it feels like we’re at their feet. What happens to them is piteous and makes them martyrs of violent gender and economic systems. For Pasolini, these tragic archetypes are worthy of sainthood.—B.L. Panther
Mamma RomaYear: 1962
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti
Rating: NR
Runtime: 106 minutes
Pasolini crystalizes hagiographic neorealism in his Mamma Roma. Starring the magnetic Anna Magnani, this story about a desperate mother’s attempts to break the family history of crime before it consumes her son is more dynamic than Accattone. There’s more style, more camera and emotional movement. While a Pasolini film in form and content, Magnani consecrates Mamma Roma. Pasolini famously preferred working with non-professional actors because they are “fragments of reality.” A professional actor “signifies that another consciousness is added to [his] own.” An actor comes with their own ideas and methods. They are always more than ‘being.’ In the case of Mamma Roma, this mix of professional and non-acting actors works exceedingly well, primarily based on the vibrancy of Magnani. Her performance is less an imposition of consciousness on the film as it is an apparition. She walks, talks and thinks differently, with the most alluring aura. Occasionally, Pasolini lifts us out of the verite style as Mamma Roma ascends to her sublime monologues against a disorienting and twinkling urban background. In these roving single tracking shots, she fulfills her namesake: She becomes a Marian figure, a sacred mother to the entire city.—B.L. Panther
Love MeetingsYear: 1964
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Rating: NR
Runtime: 89 minutes
Love Meetings documents the myths Italians were telling themselves in the mid-1960s. Asking “point blank” questions about their sexual lives and moralities, Pasolini draws together a national dialogue from candid responses at a time when modern sexual sensibilities were starting to sprout. He captures consciousness in flux, one filled with old myths about tradition, purity and nationalism, which confronts new myths of social progress and unregulated liberty. Talking to a diverse array of people—always with a sharp eye on how poverty influences sexual mores—Pasolini’s short anthropological study is endlessly fascinating, and one of the hidden gems in his filmography.—B.L. Panther
The Gospel According to MatthewYear: 1964
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Enrique Irazoqui, Margherita Caruso, Alfonso Gatto
Rating: NR
Runtime: 137 minutes
Having given Italian neorealism a mythic sensibility, Pasolini inverted this formula with The Gospel According to Matthew, in which he uses classic neorealist techniques to tell the epic story of Jesus. In true Pasolini style, the film combines painterly staged visuals amongst an unmanicured and free-roaming world. The Gospel According to Matthew is a fascinating experiment that ponders what a miracle might look like in modernist cinema. The result is a profound and refreshing retelling of the most told story in history. It is a film of double worlds, the sacred and profane. Jesus arrives against a lived-in and ancient backdrop in the context of common people. We’re there with him in medium shots, framed like someone in a newsreel. But then Pasolini cuts or pulls back, Jesus walks on water, and the mystic enters the frame. We’re left breathless, in awe. Pasolini has given us sacred feelings through secular form.—B.L. Panther
The Hawks and the SparrowsYear: 1966
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Femi Benussi
Rating: NR
Runtime: 88 minutes
After the religious epic, Pasolini takes up the fable as his next popular form in The Hawks and The Sparrows. Described by Pasolini as an “ideo-comical” film, it follows two travelers, Toto and Ninetto (played by Toto, and Ninetto Davoli), who happen upon a talking crow. The crow tells them a medieval tale of two monks charged with preaching to the birds. Stepping into the fable, our stars play the monks who develop the power to sing to birds and teach them about love. But when the hawks continue to eat the sparrows, the monks are taught the flaws in their ideology. Shaken loose from the moral of the fable, Toto and Ninetto continue on their way, encountering other walks of life before rebelling against the crow. The folk, as we’ve come to know them through the other films, are gone. This unique film presents Pasolini as a director with a message and ideological intent. Here, Pasolini combines classic storytelling genres, early cinema and modern ideology. The crow’s fable sees Toto and Ninetto play monks contemplating Marxist theory while sometimes moving as if they were in a silent film. Pasolini creates a form of creative didacticism that combines instruction and inspiration to entertain audiences in a way storytellers have been doing since the beginning of time.—B.L. Panther
Oedipus RexYear: 1967
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Silvana Mangano, Franco Citti, Alida Valli, Carmelo Bene, Julian Beck, Luciano Bartoli, Francesco Leonetti, Ahmed Belhachmi, Giovanni Ivan Scratuglia, Giandomenico Davoli, Ninetto Davoli
Rating: NR
Runtime: 104 minutes
Pasolini steps back to ancient Greece for this retelling of the famous myth. Considered highly autobiographical, the film is a “mystified and epic style” of his life. It is the reverse of The Gospel According to Matthew. Instead of myth made real, here we have reality made mythic. Beginning in the Italy of his youth and then stepping into the past, Oedipus Rex has problematic timelessness because Pasolini’s vision of the ancient past is an appropriative assemblage of ritual images from contemporary North Africa, India and the Middle East. Despite this, Pasolini’s retelling remains interesting because it is a personal application of myth onto himself. He even appears as a member of the proletariat pleading with King Oedipus. Oedipus Rex is a unique self-mythologization that tries to fit a contemporary man, with his self-awareness and neuroses, into a known and mythic story.—B.L. Panther
TeoremaYear: 1968
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Terence Stamp, Laura Betti, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky, Ninetto Davoli
Rating: NR
Runtime: 98 minutes
Even more so than Oedipus Rex, Teorema is a myth for the modern era. With this film, Pasolini stays firmly planted in the mythic mode. Mainly told through glances and gestures, the characters act out their roles according to their archetypes: The healing angel, lonely housewife, repressed son, anxious daughter, soulless father. Pasolini has removed motivation and objective from storytelling and instead places the mysterious stranger (played by the divinely handsome Terence Stamp) right in the middle of the middle-class home without explaining why he’s there. Yet even though the story is devoid of these things in keeping with the epic style, there’s still a substantial amount of psychology in this film. Keenly aware of anxieties, repressions and fetishes from his reading of Freud and various existentialists, Pasolini once again creates a film of double worlds. It is a world of artifice and interiors. The sacred and rapturous reality descends on the bourgeois house, shattering the façade of pretension, but unlike in previous films we’ve considered, Teorema eventually pulls out, and sends the profane world into an existential vacuum. After being sexually and emotionally released by the divine stranger, the modern psyche collapses towards destructive yet creative ends. Teorema is a parable for a sexual revolution in the face of economic depression.—B.L. Panther
PorcileYear: 1969
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marco Ferreri, Ugo Tognazzi, Pierre Clémenti, Alberto Lionello, Franco Citti, Anne Wiazemsky
Rating: NR
Runtime: 99 minutes
With myth, epic, fable and parable within his cinematic oeuvre, Pasolini next turned to allegory. Rather than a film with a clear moral or spiritual lesson, Porcile contains layers of meaning. One half of the film is about a cannibal wandering an otherworldly desert plane. The other half concerns the son of a bourgeois German industrialist and his strange appetite for the company of pigs. Pasolini’s satirical edge is on full display in Porcile. His indictment of the upper-class Germans living off the spoils of war is ridiculous and deliciously mocking. The two desires of the young male characters are contrasted against one other. The mythic story is a perverse saint’s story in which the main character (Pierre Clémenti) attains a state of holiness after he’s consumed human flesh. In the other tale, Julian’s (Jean-Pierre Léaud) taste for pigs represents the moral failing, hypocrisy and detachment of the bourgeois psyche. Through symbolism and inversion, Porcile is a damning allegory about primordial drives and the social contexts that determine their meaning.—B.L. Panther
MedeaYear: 1969
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Maria Callas
Rating: NR
Runtime: 106 minutes
According to Pasolini, with Medea, he wanted to show “the modern era as analogous to the past.” By the late 1960s, the role of women was changing in society, so Pasolini turned once again to ancient myth to tell a contemporary story. Medea is a classic tale about the suspicions of women’s power and the belief that it turns women into monsters. Yet, in casting opera legend Maria Callas, she takes on an unquestionable air of dignity. Callas’ unflinching eyes and curling lips are rife material for close-ups, and Pasolini combines them with wide landscape shots to tell a visual story through archetypes. Doing so produces what Pasolini calls a “poetic feeling of history,” achieving a true feeling of time and place through symbolism. Often cycling between worlds and ideologies, the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini always strive to teach us something about our experience of the world and the cinema. As a literary writer and social critic before being a film director, he could import popular story genres into a modernizing cinematic language and manipulate them into an ideological point. His films shine with a passion for those capitalism has left behind. For him, the poor, the itinerant laborers, and other social outcasts are the holy ones, for they are free from hypocrisy and moral convention. As a queer man openly at odds with the law, Pasolini’s films shine out as a call for social change, with myth and folklore as vital tools for the revolution.—B.L. Panther
Time BanditsYear: 1981
Director: Terry Gilliam
Stars: John Cleese, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Michael Palin, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm
Rating: PG
Runtime: 110 minutes
The first in Terry Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination,” Time Bandits breathes with the unfettered glee of cinematic magic. Told through the eyes of Kevin, a neglected 11 year-old (Craig Warnock), the film details a literal battle between Good and Evil, between God (Ralph Richardson) and the Devil (David Warner)—though they’re never explicitly referred to as such. What Gilliam accomplishes, as Kevin meets such luminaries as Robin Hood (John Cleese), Napoleon (Ian Holm) and an irrepressibly charming King Agamemnon (Sean Connery, of course), is the perfect ode to imagination, wherein a kid’s bedroom musings gain the seriousness and weight of world-shaking war. Like a much weirder step-cousin to Bill & Ted, Time Bandits employs nostalgia and pseudo-history in equal measure to capture, with boundless invention, what it feels like to be 11 again. —Kenneth Lowe
Medicine for MelancholyYear: 2008
Director: Barry Jenkins
Stars: Wyatt Cenac, Tracey Heggins, Elizabeth Acker
Rating: NR
Runtime: 88 minutes
Writer/director Barry Jenkins and his cinematographer James Laxton ought to host seminars about how to shoot a feature on video. Jenkins’ first film, Medicine for Melancholy, glides with a color palette so muted that, at times, it looks like black-and-white. It’s easy on the eyes, and it even dovetails nicely with the themes. Wyatt Cenac (of The Daily Show) and Tracey Heggins star in a story that plays like Before Sunrise in reverse: An African-American man and woman have a one-night stand and spend the following day wandering San Francisco and chatting about the city’s dwindling Black population. The demographic shift, which he views politically, has scarcely crossed her brow. Through their tentative relationship, the film weaves an intriguing commentary on race, class and personal identity. The trick of minimalism, though, is to hide ideas inside sparse scenes, and Jenkins is too often balancing over-stuffed dialogue with undernourished carousel rides and dances. But his willingness to take on heavy issues and handle them with a light, sexy touch shows not only a filmmaker with serious intentions but one who processes his world through his art.–Robert Davis