Criterion has unveiled the titles for their June releases and, as always, movie aficionados looking for some classic films to sink their teeth into are sure to be impressed. Among the top billed movies will beGordon Parks’ classic 1971 blaxploitation film,Shaft,as well as Parks’ 1972 sequel to the film,Shaft’s Big Score!Fans of the raunchyJohn WatersflickPink Flamingosalso have much to celebrate with its 4K release via the Criterion Collection. In a bonus feature, the king of camp will take viewers on a tour of Baltimore filming locations, so you can get the inside look at all the stops onDivine’s journey to upholding her title as the “Filthiest Person Alive.”
Makeovers abound in the new rollout, which includes a 4K digital restoration ofMichael PowellandEmeric Pressburger’s 1951 comedic opera,The Tales of Hoffmann, withStanley Kwan’s dark love story,Rougealso receiving the 4K digital restoration treatment.Ekwa Msangi’sFarewell Amorwill be coming with a loaded slate of content, including three short films by the director:Suspense,The Market King, andFarewell Amor’s prequel flick,Farewell Meu Amor. Finally, 2021 film festival darlingThe Worst Person in the Worldwill be added to June’s release, with a 2K digital master and bonus content including interviews with the feature’s director,Joachim Trier.
With a long list of classics which have already arrived this year, includingRobert Aldrich’sThe Flight of the PhoenixandJane Campion’sThe Piano, the June lineup will keep the momentum going. Check out all the bells and whistles that come with the new releases as well as their synopsis below. If you’re looking to pre-order any of the upcoming features, or just want to find out more information, head to theCriterion website.
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The Tales of Hoffmann(June 7)
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger create a phantasmagoric marriage of cinema and opera in this one-of-a-kind take on a classic story. In Jacques Offenbach’s fantasy operaThe Tales of Hoffmann,a poet dreams of three women—a mechanical performing doll, a bejeweled siren, and the consumptive daughter of a famous composer—all of whom break his heart in different ways. Powell and Pressburger’s feverishly romantic adaptation is a feast of music, dance, and visual effects, and one of the most exhilarating opera films ever produced.
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Farewell Amor(June 14)
In her luminous feature debut, filmmaker Ekwa Msangi chronicles a broken family’s journey to wholeness with empathy and insight. Seventeen years after his family was separated by the civil war in Angola, a New York taxi driver (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is reunited with his now devoutly religious wife (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter (Jayme Lawson) when they are finally able to follow him to America. But after living thousands of miles apart for so long, the three find they must discover one another’s strengths, forgive one another’s weaknesses, and bridge cultural and generational divides to build a life together. Told in three perspective-shifting chapters that honor the multitude of struggles and emotions that make up the immigrant experience,Farewell Amoris a bittersweet, compassionate evocation of how it feels when your heart and your home are in different places.
Rouge(June 21)
Cantopop superstars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung display the androgynous magnetism that made them icons as doomed lovers in this emblematic film of Hong Kong’s Second New Wave, directed by pioneering queer melodrama master Stanley Kwan.Rougebridges past and present in its tragic romance between a humble courtesan and the wayward scion of a wealthy family, who embrace death by suicide pact amid the opulent teahouses of 1930s Hong Kong. Fifty years later, she returns to the city-state to find him, drawing a young contemporary couple (Alex Man and Emily Chu) into her quest to rekindle a passion that may be as illusory as time itself. With its lush mise-en-scène and transcendently melancholy mood, this sensuous ghost story is an exquisite, enduringly resonant elegy for both lost love and vanishing history.
Shaft(June 21)
While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director Gordon Parks made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and gave the screen a new kind of badder-than-bad action hero in John Shaft (Richard Roundtree, in a career-defining role), a streetwise New York City private eye who is as tough with criminals as he is tender with his lovers. After Shaft is recruited to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem mob boss (Moses Gunn) from Italian gangsters, he finds himself in the middle of a rapidly escalating uptown vs. downtown turf war. A vivid time capsule of seventies Manhattan in all its gritty glory that has inspired sequels and multimedia reboots galore, the originalShaftis studded with indelible elements—from Roundtree’s sleek leather fashions to the iconic funk and soul score by Isaac Hayes.
The Worst Person in the World(June 28)
Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for the revelatory, complex performance that anchors this sprawlingly novelistic film by Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier, an emotionally intricate and exhilarating character study of a woman entering her thirties. Amid the seemingly endless possibilities of the modern world, Julie (Reinsve) vacillates between artistic passions and professions, the question of motherhood, and relationships with two very different men: a successful comic-book artist (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie) and a charismatic barista (Herbert Nordrum). Working with a team of longtime collaborators, Trier and his perennial cowriter Eskil Vogt construct inThe Worst Person in the World,the Oscar-nominated third entry in their unofficial Oslo Trilogy, a liberating portrait of self-discovery and a bracingly contemporary spin on the romantic comedy.
Pink Flamingos(June 28)
John Waters made bad taste perversely transcendent with the forever shocking counterculture sensationPink Flamingos,his most infamous and daring cinematic transgression. Outré diva Divine is iconic as the wanted criminal hiding out with her family of degenerates in a trailer outside Baltimore while reveling in her tabloid notoriety as the “Filthiest Person Alive.” When a pair of sociopaths (Mink Stole and David Lochary) with a habit of kidnapping women in order to impregnate them attempt to challenge her title, Divine resolves to show them and the world the true meaning of the wordfilthy.Incest, cannibalism, shrimping, and film history’s most legendary gross-out ending—Waters and his merry band of Dreamlanders leave no taboo unsmashed in this gleefully subversive ode to outsiderhood, in which camp spectacle and pitch-black satire are wielded in an all-out assault on respectability.
