The Criterion Collection Complete

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Medea [1969] Spine #0000F9 Blu-ray In this hypnotic adaptation of Euripides’s immortal tragedy, Pier Paolo Pasolini casts opera diva Maria Callas (utterly arresting in her only film role) as the sorceress of Greek legend, whose separation from her homeland of Colchis and betrayal by her lover, Jason, lead her down a path of shocking vengeance. Melding Western myth with aesthetic and musical influences from numerous world cultures, Pasolini fashions a mesmerizing cinematic pageant that gathers in force until it explodes in rage and a stunningly nihilistic condemnation of injustice. 110 minutes Monaural Color In Italian 1:85:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was 51 when he directed Porcile . Other Pasolini films in the Collection: #0000F1: Accattone (1961) #0000F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #0000F3: Love Meetings (1964) #0000F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) #0000F5: The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) #0000F6: Oedipus Re...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Porcile [1969] Spine #0000F8 Blu-ray “I killed my father. I ate human flesh. I quiver with joy.” Provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini is at his most incendiary in this double-edged allegory on fascism, consumerism, and resistance. In one story, a defiant man (Pierre Clémenti) perpetrates increasingly barbaric acts while wandering a mythic, volcanic landscape. In the other, the scion (Jean-Pierre Léaud) of a wealthy, ex-Nazi industrial family conceals a shocking proclivity. Taken together, these stories of transgression form a scathing commentary on postwar European moral rot and the meaning of rebellion in the face of a corrupt world. 98 minutes Monaural Color In Italian 1:85:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was 51 when he directed Porcile . Other Pasolini films in the Collection: #0000F1: Accattone (1961) #0000F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #0000F3: Love Meetings (1964) #0000F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) #0000F5: The ...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Oedipus Rex [1967] Spine #0000F6 Blu-ray Pier Paolo Pasolini’s powerfully iconoclastic take on Sophocles’s tragedy blends eras and cultures to create a searing exploration of fate, free will, and the things we fear most in ourselves. Shot amid the stark, elemental landscapes of the Moroccan desert, and set in an indefinable ancient past, this bold reimagining casts the filmmaker’s frequent collaborator Franco Citti as the eponymous foundling, whose willful blindness to his own nature unleashes a cataclysmic reckoning. With a prologue and epilogue set in twentieth-century Italy, Pasolini connects the story to his own upbringing, daring to bare his soul on-screen. 104 minutes Monaural Color In Italian 1:85:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was 45 when he directed Oedipus Rex . Other Pasolini films in the Collection: #0000F1: Accattone (1961) #0000F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #0000F3: Love Meetings (1964) #0000F4: The Gospel Accordi...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) The Hawks and the Sparrows [1966] Spine #0000F5 Blu-ray While wandering the countryside, a pair of father-and-son vagabonds (played respectively by Italian cinema legend Totò, in his final major film role, and Ninetto Davoli) happen upon a talking crow who spouts philosophy and launches them on a freewheeling picaresque through time, space, and the margins of a rapidly modernizing Italy. A comic Marxist fable that balances heady ideas about religion, poverty, and class struggle with irreverent slapstick sight gags,  The Hawks and the Sparrows  finds Pasolini at his lightest yet as stingingly subversive as ever. 89 minutes Monaural Black and White In Italian 1:85:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was 44 when he directed The Hawks and the Sparrows . Other Pasolini films in the Collection: #0000F1: Accattone (1961) #0000F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #0000F3: Love Meetings (1964) #0000F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) The Gospel According to St. Matthew [1964] Spine #0000F4 Blu-ray A biblical epic that only the Marxist dissident Pier Paolo Pasolini could make, this intensely faithful adaptation of Saint Matthew’s Gospel depicts the life and teachings of Jesus Christ (Enrique Irazoqui, a Spanish economics student and Communist activist), whose unwavering compassion for the poor and defiant condemnation of moral hypocrisy make him a perhaps unexpected embodiment of the director’s own worldview. Stunningly shot amid the timeless landscapes of southern Italy and set to a soundtrack that encompasses everything from Bach to Black spirituals,  The Gospel According to Matthew  cuts past dogma and straight to the core of Jesus’s radical humanism. 137 minutes Monaural Black and White In Italian 1:85:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was 42 when he directed The Gospel According to St. Matthew . Other Pasolini films in the Collection: #0000F1: ...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Love Meetings [1961] Spine #0000F3 Blu-ray Let’s talk about sex. In this radically engaged and engaging documentary, Pier Paolo Pasolini takes to the streets, town squares, beaches, factories, and universities of 1960s Italy to solicit everyday citizens’ thoughts on a host of hot-button subjects, including sex work, gender equality, homosexuality, and divorce (then illegal in Italy). What emerges is both a kaleidoscopic cross section of faces and places—from the industrialized cities of the North to the rural villages of the South—and an incisive portrait of a society where, despite the rapid modernization brought on by the postwar “economic miracle,” hypocrisy, repression, and conformism still hold sway. 92 minutes Monaural Black and White In Italian 1:85:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was 42 when he directed Love Meetings . Other Pasolini films in the Collection: #0000F1: Accattone (1961) #0000F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #0...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Accattone [1961] Spine #0000F1 Blu-ray Poet and painter turned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy with his very first feature by using Catholic iconography and liturgical music to render a plaintive, brutally beautiful portrait of a shiftless Roman pimp and thief (then-nonprofessional Franco Citti, in a revelatory performance) whose life of petty crime turns increasingly desperate when the woman who supports him is imprisoned. Melding a hardscrabble neorealist milieu with classical influences, Pasolini offers a vision of underclass struggle as a kind of modern sainthood. 117 minutes Monaural Black and White In Italian 1:37:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was 39 when he directed Accattone . Other Pasolini films in the Collection: #0000F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #0000F3: Love Meetings (1964) #0000F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) #0000F5: The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) #0000F6: Oedipus Rex (1967) ...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) [1961-69] Spine #0000F Blu-ray 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. Criterion Release 2023 #0000F1: Accattone (1961) #0000F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #0000F3: Love Meetings (1964) #0000F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)...

VALDEZ, Luis (United States) La Bamba [1987] Spine #1193 Blu-ray The brief but incandescent life of rock-and-roll trailblazer Ritchie Valens is immortalized in this enthralling biopic from another Mexican American icon, Luis Valdez, the father of Chicano cinema. With sweetness and swagger, Lou Diamond Phillips embodies the 1950s California teenager who, forged by his fiercely supportive mother (Rosanna DeSoto) and rebellious brother (Esai Morales), rises from his farm-working roots to chart-topping fame in the early days of rock—until one fateful night that haunts music history. Propelled by a hip-shaking soundtrack featuring Los Lobos and Carlos Santana,  La Bamba  captures the electric vitality of an artist who bridged cultures to create his own American dream. 108 minutes 5.1 Surround Color 1:85:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Luis Valdez was 47 when he directed  La Bamba . The Film a Film Rating (0-60): 60 The Extras The Booklet Commentary Video tribute Do...

MORGEN, Brett (United States) Moonage Daydream [2022] Spine #1192 Blu-ray An ecstatic voyage through the creative and spiritual universe of David Bowie,  Moonage Daydream  is a fittingly unclassifiable tribute to the shape-shifting rock iconoclast and his singular sound and vision. Exploding the conventions of the music documentary, director Brett Morgen remixes dazzling, never-before-seen footage of the artist throughout his career, reveling in his otherworldly presence while revealing the restless philosophical inquiry that guided his myriad metamorphoses. Graced with soulful narration by Bowie, this immersive audiovisual head rush transmits the essence of a phenomenon that cannot be explained—only experienced. 134 minutes Dolby Atmos Color/Black and White 1:78:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Brett Morgen was 54 when he directed  Moonage Daydream . The Film a Film Rating (0-60): 60 The Extras The Booklet Commentary Video tribute Documentary 1 Documentary 2 D...

WELLES, Orson (France) The Trial [1962] Spine #1191 Blu-ray A feverishly inspired take on Franz Kafka’s novel, Orson Welles’s  The Trial  casts Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office drone Josef K., whose arrest for an unspecified crime plunges him into a menacing bureaucratic labyrinth of guilt, corruption, and paranoia. Exiled from Hollywood and creatively unchained, Welles poured his ire at the studio system, the blacklist, and all forms of totalitarian oppression into this cinematic statement—a bold, personal film that he himself considered one of his greatest. Dizzying camera angles, expressionistic lighting, increasingly surreal locations—Welles unleashed the full force of his visual brilliance to convey the nightmarish disorientation of a world gone mad. 118 minutes Monaural Black and White 1:66:1 Criterion Release 2023 Director/Writer Orson Welles was 47 when he directed  The Trial . Other Welles films in the Collection: #1104: Citizen Kane (1941) #952: The M...