Posted Wed Mar 15, 2023 at 11:38 AM PDT by Tom Landy
Coming this summer are The Rules of the Game and Time Bandits on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, as well as The Servant, Medicine for Melancholy, and Pasolini 101 on Blu-ray.
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!
First up on June 6 is a 4K UHD upgrade of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game coming June 6th
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.
1939 • 106 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio
4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
Following that is a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray edition of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits on 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.
1981 • 116 minutes • Color • Stereo • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
On June 20 is a Blu-ray release of Joseph Losey's The Servant.
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.
1963 • 115 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
Also on June 20 comes Medicine for Melancholy from filmmaker Barry Jenkins on Blu-ray.
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.
2008 • 88 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.78:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
And finally at the end of the month on June 27 arrives the Blu-ray boxed set, Pasolini 101, in celebration of the 101th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's birth.
We've already covered Pasolini 101 in this article and as always, we will update with preorder links as soon as they are available.
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