The Criterion Collection Complete

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Medea [1969] Spine #F9 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: #F1: Accattone (1961) #F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #F3: Love Meetings (1964) #F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) #F5: The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) #F6: Oedipus Rex (1967) #F7/#1013: Teorema ...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Porcile [1969] Spine #F8 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: #F1: Accattone (1961) #F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #F3: Love Meetings (1964) #F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) #F5: The Hawks and the Sparrows (...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Oedipus Rex [1967] Spine #F6 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: #F1: Accattone (1961) #F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #F3: Love Meetings (1964) #F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) The Hawks and the Sparrows [1966] Spine #F5 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: #F1: Accattone (1961) #F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #F3: Love Meetings (1964) #F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) #F6: Oedipus R...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) The Gospel According to St. Matthew [1964] Spine #F4 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: #F1: Accatton...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Love Meetings [1961] Spine #F3 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: #F1: Accattone (1961) #F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #F4: The Gospe...

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy) Accattone [1961] Spine #F1 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: #F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962) #F3: Love Meetings (1964) #F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) #F5: The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) #F6: Oedipus Rex (1967) #F7/#1013: Teorema (1968...