Coming in June: Medicine for Melancholy, the sublime San Francisco–set feature debut of love and connection by Barry Jenkins, rubs shoulders with The Servant, Joseph Losey’s savagely witty British class-war classic, while two favorites—The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir’s merciless critique of French society, and Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam’s fantastic odyssey to the limits of the imagination—arrive on 4K UHD. Plus, our recently announced nine-film box set Pasolini 101!
The Rules of the Game (#216) out June 6
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. The Special Edition Features are:
- New 4K restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray of the film with special features
- Introduction to the film by director Jean Renoir
- Audio commentary written by film scholar Alexander Sesonske and read by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
- Comparison of the film’s two endings
- Selected-scene analysis by Renoir historian Chris Faulkner
- Excerpts from a 1966 French television program by filmmaker Jacques Rivette
- Part one of Jean Renoir, a two-part 1993 documentary by film critic David Thompson
- Video essay about the film’s production, release, and 1959 reconstruction
- Interview with film critic Olivier Curchod
- Interview from a 1965 episode of the French television series Les écrans de la ville with Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand
- Interviews with set designer Max Douy; Renoir’s son, Alain; and actor Mila Parély
- PLUS: An essay by Sesonske; writings by Jean Renoir, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bertrand Tavernier, and François Truffaut; and tributes to the film by J. Hoberman, Kent Jones, Paul Schrader, Wim Wenders, Robert Altman, and others
Time Bandits (#37) out June 13
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 Director-Approved Special Edition Features are:
- New 4K restoration, supervised by director Terry Gilliam, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray of the film with special features
- Audio commentary featuring Gilliam, cowriter-actor Michael Palin, and actors John Cleese, David Warner, and Craig Warnock
- Program on the creation of the film’s various historical periods and fantasy worlds, narrated by film writer David Morgan and featuring production designer Milly Burns and costume designer James Acheson
- Conversation between Gilliam and film scholar Peter von Bagh, recorded at the 1998 Midnight Sun Film Festival
- Appearance by actor Shelley Duvall on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show from 1981
- Gallery of rare photographs from the set
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic David Sterritt
The Servant (#1182) out June 20
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. The Special Edition Features are:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- New program on director Joseph Losey by film critic Imogen Sara Smith
- Rare interview from 1976 with Losey by critic Michel Ciment
- Interview from 1996 with screenwriter Harold Pinter
- Interviews with actors Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah Miles, and Wendy Craig
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by author Colm Tóibín
Medicine for Melancholy (#1183) out June 20
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. The Director-Approved Special Edition Features are:
- New high-definition digital master, approved by director Barry Jenkins and director of photography James Laxton, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- New audio commentary featuring Jenkins
- Audio commentary from 2008 featuring Jenkins, producers Justin Barber and Cherie Saulter, and editor Nat Sanders
- New program about the making of the film, featuring Sanders and actor Wyatt Cenac
- Camera test footage and blooper reel
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Danielle Amir Jackson
Pasolini 101 out June 27
One of the most original and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini embodied a multitude of often seemingly contradictory ideologies and identities—and he expressed them all in his provocative, lyrical, and indelible films. Relentlessly concerned with society’s downtrodden and marginalized, he elevated pimps, hustlers, sex workers, and vagabonds to the realm of saints, while depicting actual saints with a radical earthiness. Traversing the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, the mythic and the personal, the nine uncompromising, often scandal-inciting features he made in the 1960s still stand—on this, the 101st anniversary of his birth—as a monument to his daring vision of cinema as a form of resistance.
- 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
- 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
