Luchino Visconti's melancholy epic 'The Leopard' was grievously misused when it opened in the United States in 1963. The film's American distributor, 20th Century Fox, clipped its running time to 161 minutes from 185, released it with a dubbed English-language soundtrack rather than Visconti's preferred Italian version, printed Giuseppe Rotunno's muted Technicolor cinematography in Fox's lesser DeLuxe Color process, and trimmed the top and bottom of the widescreen Super Technirama images to conform to Fox's slightly wider CinemaScope format. It seems as if 'The Leopard' has been in a continuous state of restoration ever since. In 1983 Fox re-released the film with its Italian soundtrack and original running time, and in 2004, after a major overhaul of the original camera negative, Criterion issued an excellent DVD edition supervised by Rotunno. A further restoration, financed by Gucci and the Film Foundation, had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and now Criterion has issued a Blu-ray upgrade of its 2004 transfer. I don't know what the differences are between Criterion's Blu-ray and the Film Foundation edition, but it's hard to imagine 'The Leopard' looking much better on home video than it does in the new high definition version. Even among Visconti's meticulous works, this is a film that stands out for its careful, systematic use of color and texture, elements that come to the forefront in the new disc. Based on a best-selling 1958 novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 'The Leopard' is a study in social transformation and individual mortality. It is 1860, and Garibaldi's thousand-man army has arrived in Sicily with the intention of conquering the island in the name of a new, unified Italy, under the rule of the northern king Victor Emmanuel II. Don Fabrizio, the cultivated, calmly authoritative Prince of Salina -- effectively the film's title character -- lives in full consciousness of his historical position. Played by Burt Lancaster (effortlessly imposing, even with an Italian actor dubbing his lines), the prince is instantly aware that the emerging Italy of the Risorgimento will mean the end of the feudal aristocracy and the rise of a new social class: the bourgeois businessman. He is determined to buy some time for himself and his family, not by resisting the new order but by coming to terms with it. 'If we want things to say the same,' says his ambitious young nephew, Tancredi (Alain Delon), 'everything will have to change.' The prince agrees, and arranges for Tancredi's marriage to Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the beautiful but barely educated daughter of the arriviste landowner Don Calogero (Paolo Stoppa). Radically pruning Lampedusa's novel, Visconti brackets his film between two transformative social events: the battle in the streets of Palermo, as Garibaldi's red-shirted soldiers (the foresighted Tancredi among them) rout the local forces, and the great ball (undated in the movie, but two years later in the novel) at which Angelina will make her society debut. Between these two majestically staged sequences, everything seems to have changed: the color palette has evolved from the muted earth tones of brown, green and gray into the bright, artificial tints of red, yellow and blue; the open, cloudless Sicilian sky has been replaced by the frescoed ceilings of a palazzo; the temperature has plunged, from midday heat to a twilight chill. And yet, on another level, everything has stayed the same. Visconti films both the battle and the ball from a distanced, lofty position, looking down on the action from an elevated point of view, gathering vast numbers of extras into his wide-angle images. He films the battle as if it were a ball, emphasizing the coordinated movement of troops from one tableau-like composition to another, and he films the ball as if it were a battle, as the many rooms of the palace, each opening on another, are invaded by snaking lines of dancers. It is the ball, as the prince comes to realize over the course of this superbly, audaciously sustained sequence (it occupies nearly a third of the film's running time), that completes the action begun in the battle. With Angelica's acceptance by the Palermo aristocracy -- a moment encapsulated when the prince leads her into a waltz, his authority re-energized by her youth and beauty, her awkwardness ennobled by his poise -- the once inviolable barrier between the classes crumbles and falls. The dance over, the prince knows there is nothing left for him but to die, which, in most historical epics, he would probably do as quickly and tearfully as possible. But Visconti could tolerate nothing so obvious. Instead he follows the suddenly old man -- Lancaster, only 50 at the time of the filming, seems to take on decades as he studies himself in a mirror -- as he drifts through the rest of the ball, moving from room to room as the crowd thins, and the music fades. For all of his eloquence in staging these large scenes, Visconti can sometimes stumble into cliche in more intimate moments. A scene between the prince and his wife (Rina Morelli) as they prepare for what has long since been a cold marital bed is as broadly drawn as a mother-in-law cartoon. As the prince tells her of his plans to marry off Tancredi, Visconti shows her scowling like John Tenniel's Red Queen and fingering her rosary. Many of the supporting characters are rendered with similarly broad, satirical strokes: Romolo Valli's toadying Father Pirrone, Giuliano Gemma's strutting general. Although Visconti would continue to work for another 13 years (his last film, 'The Innocent,' was released after his death in 1976), 'The Leopard' proved to be his last great work. His sympathy for Lancaster's declining prince, which is at least in part a self-portrait (Visconti was from an aristocratic family, though of the north rather than the south) developed into a fascination with decadence for its own sake, played out in lurid terms that frequently crossed over into camp: Dirk Bogarde vigorously rouging his cheeks in 'Death in Venice,' Helmut Berger impersonating Marlene Dietrich in 'The Damned' or sucking on sweets in 'Ludwig.' In 'The Leopard' Visconti achieves a near-perfect balance of personal drama and historical perspective. The prince may shed a tear as he examines himself in the mirror, but there is no self-pity in it, no voluptuous surrender to death. In the time it takes to shed a tear and dry it, an epoch has passed -- and the ball goes on. (Criterion Collection, Blu-ray and standard definition, $49.95, not rated) ALSO OUT THIS WEEK 'HOT TUB TIME MACHINE' Plagued by problems in their adult lives, four friends (John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson and Clark Duke) are delighted to wake up after a night of ski resort revelry and find themselves in the full bloom of youth, around 1986. Steve Pink directed. 'If you are a connoisseur of sexual, scatological or just plain stupid humor,' A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times in March. 'You will find your appetite satisfied, even glutted.' (MGM, Blu-ray $39.99, standard definition $29.98, available in both R and unrated editions) 'THE CRAZIES' Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell star in a remake of George Romero's 1973 horror film about a small town that suddenly erupts in apparently inexplicable violence. In The Times in February Mike Hale wrote, 'The filmmakers seem so determined to make a serious, respectable horror movie that they have only the bare minimum of fun.' Breck Eisner directed. (Overture, Blu-ray $39.98, standard definition $29.98, R) 'THE WHITE RIBBON' In the years before World War I a German town erupts in apparently inexplicable violence. Michael Haneke ('Cache') directed this allegorical thriller; Ulrich Tukur and Susanne Lothar star. The film mystifies 'the historical phenomenon it purports to investigate,' A.O. Scott wrote in The Times in December. (Sony, Blu-ray $38.90, standard definition $28.96, R) 'EVERLASTING MOMENTS' In the Sweden of 1911 a working-class woman (Maria Heiskanen) discovers the joys and responsibilities of photography. Jan Troell ('The Emigrants') directed. The narrator's 'wistful, elegiac recollections extend to the film's visual texture, its brownish hues and grainy, wintry sunlight,' A.O. Scott wrote in The Times in March 2009. (Criterion Collection, Blu-ray and standard definition, $39.95, not rated) 'PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF' A socially awkward high school student (Logan Lerman) discovers he is the son of Poseidon and possessed of vast supernatural powers. What's more, he's in Dutch on Mount Olympus, unjustly accused of having stolen Zeus' lightning bolt. Chris Columbus, an old hand at children's fantasy ('Home Alone,' 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone') directed; the guest adults include Sean Bean, Pierce Brosnan, Steve Coogan and Uma Thurman (as Medusa). 'Greek mythology barges into the sanitized ethos of 'High School Musical' in the frenziedly busy screen adaptation of Rick Riordan's popular 2005 novel, 'The Lightning Thief,' Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in February. (Fox, Blu-ray $39.99, standard definition $29.99, PG) 