This December, spend the holiday season with America’s most beloved purveyor of underground filth: our John Waters retrospective collects the best of the Pope of Trash, and the latest installment of Adventures in Moviegoing takes a trip through his cinematic memories. Hitchcock for the Holidays returns with a hefty helping of suspense classics, while Déjà Vu? collects mind-bending triumphs of nonlinear storytelling. There’s plenty more to choose from this month, including a sampler of MTV Productions’s turn-of-the-century thrills, a selection of Columbia Pictures’s pre-Code button-pushers, a pair of restored Jacques Rivette classics, and Paul Verhoeven’s provocative Benedetta.

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TOP STORIES

The one and only “Pope of Trash,” John Waters has always pushed the envelope of independent cinema to bizarre, grotesque, and subversive extremes with a sense of humor and panache that makes the outrageous infectious and the blasphemous a blast. Beyond shock and thrills, his deep empathy for his characters made unlikely movie stars of Baltimore’s counterculture misfits (most famously the outré diva Divine). From scuzzy underground transgressions like Multiple Maniacs and Female Trouble to more mainstream but equally personal works like Hairspray and Cry-Baby, Waters’s gleefully perverse, wickedly funny films are celebrations of the outsiders, iconoclasts, and weirdos who refuse to conform.

FEATURING: Multiple Maniacs (1970), Female Trouble (1974), Desperate Living (1977), Polyester (1981), Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990)*, Serial Mom (1994)*, Cecil B. Demented (2000)

Merry Hitch-mas to all! For five decades, Alfred Hitchcock explored our innermost anxieties, desires, and obsessions in his diabolically constructed thrillers, which redefined the mechanics of screen terror through meticulous editing, voyeuristic camera work, and unforgettable set pieces. From early British classics like The 39 Steps and Sabotage to his endlessly analyzed and imitated 1950s masterpieces such as Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, and North by Northwest and often-overlooked late-career auteurist statements like Topaz and Frenzy, the Master of Suspense tapped into the peculiar pleasures of fear like no filmmaker before or since.

FEATURING: Downhill (1927), The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969), Frenzy (1972)

Stop me if you think you’ve seen this one before . . . Cinema has an inherent ability to reshape time and, in the hands of a master filmmaker, temporality itself can become a unique means of immersive, brain-rewiring storytelling. Featuring looping timelines, fragmented memories, and alternate “butterfly effect” versions of events, these films—which encompass science fiction (12 Monkeys), psychological thrillers (Memento), and surreal mind-benders (Mulholland Dr.)—have the power to make us rethink our very perception of reality.

FEATURING: Vertigo (1958), La Jetée (1963), Blind Chance (1981), 12 Monkeys (1995)*, Run Lola Run (1998), Donnie Darko (2001), Memento (2000), Mulholland Dr. (2001), Mind Game (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), The Beast (2023)

In the early 1930s—when the censorial Hollywood Production Code wasn’t yet enforced and sex, sin, and sleaze were splashed across the screen with abandon—Columbia Pictures was distinguished by the working-class, populist milieu of their productions, which stood in contrast to the polished, escapist gloss of larger studios like MGM and Paramount. Under the direction of humanist masters like Franks Capra and Borzage, stars such as Barbara Stanwyck (Forbidden), Carole Lombard (Virtue), and Spencer Tracy (Man’s Castle) shone brightly in films that blended bold, realistic narratives with sharp, Depression-era social commentary.

FEATURING: Ladies of Leisure (1930), Ten Cents a Dance (1931), Forbidden (1932), Shopworn (1932), Three Wise Girls (1932), Virtue (1932), Man’s Castle (1933)

A sui generis icon of counterculture cinema and style, John Waters upends traditional notions of “good taste” and heteronormative social conventions with a gleefully transgressive mix of camp humor, outrageous provocation, and daring empathy. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he sits down with film critic Michael Koresky to discuss his formative moviegoing memories in both his beloved hometown of Baltimore, where the shock cinema of B-movie meister William Castle made a lasting impression, and in New York City, where he was influenced by the uncompromising underground scene championed by critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. The films Waters has chosen to present—including Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss and Barbara Loden’s Wanda—are connected by their focus on complicated women who defy moral and social norms, as portrayed by iconoclastic filmmakers who also challenge and subvert the status quo.

FEATURING: Brink of Life (1958), The Naked Kiss (1964), Wanda (1970), Story of Women (1988), Last Summer (2024)

In the 1990s and early 2000s, pop-culture juggernaut MTV was everywhere—including cinemas, where its logo graced films as hilarious, out-there, and improbable as Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, The Original Kings of Comedy, and, yes, Jackass: The Movie. Practically defining the youth zeitgeist of the times and set to always-amazing soundtracks, these edgy, risk-taking films bridged alternative and mainstream cultures in a way that feels all but unimaginable today.

FEATURING: Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)*, Election (1999), The Original Kings of Comedy* (2000), Jackass: The Movie* (2002)

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

Featuring a new interview with director Catherine Breillat, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

After a decade-long absence, Catherine Breillat triumphantly returns with an exploration of the themes that have made her one of cinema’s most rousing and controversial directors: the ecstasies and wounds of sexuality, and its power to unsettle. A remarkably inscrutable Léa Drucker plays Anne—an attorney advocating for abused minors—who enjoys an enviable lifestyle with her husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), a milquetoast businessman and ineffectual father to Théo (newcomer Samuel Kircher), his troubled teenage son from a previous marriage. Compelled by her stepson’s Apollonian beauty, Anne embarks on an affair that threatens the stability of her household, along with her professional integrity, as she faces a choice between accountability and deception. Original music by Kim Gordon and radiantly expressionist cinematography by Jeanne Lapoirie heighten the erotic and ethical tensions of Last Summer, Breillat’s latest foray into the outer limits of desire.

Featuring a new interview with Room 999 director Lubna Playoust, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

“Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” That’s the question Wim Wenders posed to a selection of leading filmmakers—including Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, and Michelangelo Antonioni—at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival in his probing documentary Room 666. Forty years later, Lubna Playoust puts the same question to a new generation of directors—among them Claire Denis, David Cronenberg, and Lynne Ramsay—in her thought-provoking homage Room 999. Taken together, these insightful works form a fascinating reflection on the evolving economic and technological challenges of filmmaking, the meaning and relevance of cinema in the modern world, and the relationship between artists and their craft.

Unfolding in nine incisive vignettes, this elegantly minimalist, powerfully subversive portrait of the everyday absurdity of life under authoritarianism follows an array of Iranians as they navigate the cultural, religious, and institutional constraints imposed on them by various social authorities, from schoolteachers to bureaucrats. These stirring snapshots—by turns humorous, affecting, Kafkaesque, and tragic—capture the spirit and determination of ordinary people in the face of adversity, offering a provocative, nuanced perspective on a complex society.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

A deadly game of chance and fate plays out amid the desolation of the West Texas wilderness in the Coen brothers’ starkly powerful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A conversation between the Coens and author Megan Abbott; interviews with actors Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly Macdonald; behind-the-scenes documentaries; and more.

Filth maestro John Waters took advantage of his biggest budget yet to allow his muse Divine to sink his teeth into a role unlike any he had played before: Baltimore housewife Francine Fishpaw, a heroine worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Waters, a conversation between Waters and critic Michael Musto, interviews with cast and crew members, deleted scenes, and more.

With the biopic A Complete Unknown hitting theaters this month, experience the documentary landmark that captured Bob Dylan as no other film has before or since.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary 1999 by director D. A. Pennebaker and tour manager Bob Neuwirth, a conversation between Pennebaker and music critic Greil Marcus, an interview with Patti Smith, Pennebaker’s documentary 65 Revisited, and more.

Perky, overachieving high schooler Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) and her social-studies teacher (Matthew Broderick) clash over a student-body election in Alexander Payne’s cutting satire.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Payne, an interview with Witherspoon, a documentary on the making of the film, and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Originator of the hugely popular Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub franchises, Kenji Misumi was a master of the chanbara (“sword fighting”) genre who brought thrilling stylistic flourishes and unique psychological and emotional depth to his many classic films. Among his finest achievements, the three thematically linked works that make up his so-called Sword Trilogy—all starring Raizo Ichikawa—combine breathtaking visuals with complex explorations of family, tradition, heroism, masculinity, and violence.

FEATURING: Kiru (1962), Ken (1964), Kenki (1965)

Steeped in Irish history and lore, the films of Dónal Foreman are searching, shape-shifting explorations of place, cultural memory, and national identity. Working across narrative, documentary, and experimental practices, his three features to date—the vivid Dublin-set youth portrait Out of Here, the profoundly personal essay on the Troubles The Image You Missed, and the beautifully dreamy metafiction inspired by Ireland’s ancient pirate queen The Cry of Granuaile—have established him as one of contemporary Irish cinema’s most consistently intriguing voices.

FEATURING: Out of Here (2013), The Image You Missed (2018), The Cry of Granuaile (2022)

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

A mind-bending cult classic of DIY horror, Don Coscarelli’s epic tale of the Tall Man, his deadly silver Sentinel Spheres, and a group of small-town friends who must band together to stop his dimension-hopping schemes was made on a shoestring budget by a cast and crew comprised largely of friends and family, but its sheer audaciousness, gonzo visuals, and haunting exploration of the dark side of childhood fantasy have ensured that its legend has lived on (spawning four sequels along the way). Suffused with a mood of dreamlike dread and featuring an epic, eardrum-pounding synth score, Phantasm took indie horror into new realms of delirious imagination.

Mike Leigh announced himself as a unique, powerful new voice in British cinema with Bleak Moments, a stunning debut of understated melancholy. Adapting his own theatrical play for the screen, Leigh follows Sylvia (Anne Raitt) through a life of quiet desperation in suburban South London as she attends to her developmentally challenged sister (Sarah Stephenson) and attempts to forge romances with her awkward professorial boyfriend (Eric Allan) as well as a shy, guitar-strumming newsletter duplicator (Mike Bradwell). Uncomfortable silences, botched flirtations, and fleeting hints of warmth and humor punctuate Sylvia’s aching descent into solitude, compassionately portrayed by Leigh as symptomatic of humanity’s struggle to communicate and connect.

Featuring a new documentary about the making of the film

In many ways a breakthrough work for director Jacques Rivette (and a thematic precursor to his legendary Out 1, released two years later), this epic portrait of a relationship in breakdown found the French New Wave’s most uncompromising auteur pushing the conventions of cinema to their limit to explore his trademark obsessions with the boundaries between performance and reality, stage and cinema, structure and improvisation, and the modern and the mythic. Amid rehearsals for a televised production of Racine’s Andromaque, an actor (Bulle Ogier) and theater director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) see their marriage implode, a situation that grows increasingly volatile when he replaces her with his mistress.

Perfect strangers Marie (Bulle Ogier) and Baptiste (Bulle’s daughter Pascale Ogier) run into each other three times on an otherwise ordinary day in Paris and decide that fate has brought them together. But why? Just released from jail, Marie discovers that her boyfriend, Julien (Pierre Clémenti), is involved in a dangerous conspiracy and enlists the impulsive, combative Baptiste to help her unravel it. Using the City of Light’s outlying, dilapidated nooks and crannies as his playground, storied French New Waver Jacques Rivette constructs one of his finest cinematic games with Le Pont du Nord, an entrancing mystery that straddles the line between childlike whimsy and surrealist adventure.

When Paul Okpokam arrived in the U.S. in 1968, David Schickele decided to make a film about his Nigerian friend’s experience of coming to teach at San Francisco State College. Entering American society in a time of cultural upheaval and racial tension, Okpokam is seen by others through the prism of American racism and exoticism. Truth is stranger than fiction in Bushman, a rare sort of film portrait, part document, part imagined, and poetic in its approach to real events.

INTERNATIONAL CLASSICS

The last feature to date by Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien is a wondrous take on the traditional wuxia film, rich with shimmering, breathing texture and punctuated by brief but unforgettable bursts of action.

The ever-provocative Paul Verhoeven brings his taboo-busting vision to a seventeenth-century convent for this ecstatically blasphemous tale of religion, sex, and scandal.

HOLLYWOOD HITS

A sensational Barbra Streisand became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major Hollywood film with this charming, gender-bending musical adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story.

ENCORES

Nineties indie queen Parker Posey is at her effortlessly cool best in this irresistible comic time capsule of the era’s New York City club scene.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Barbara Stanwyck sizzles, Henry Fonda bumbles, and Preston Sturges runs riot in one of the all-time great screwballs, a pitch-perfect blend of comic zing and swoonworthy romance.

The director of Perfect Days introduces one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most uncannily spellbinding films.

Featuring an introduction by programmer and critic Irena Kovarova, directors Miloš Forman and Jan Němec, and film professor Peter Hames

Of all the cinematic New Waves that broke over the world in the 1960s, the one in Czechoslovakia was among the most fruitful, fascinating, and radical. With a wicked sense of humor and a healthy streak of surrealism, a group of fearless filmmakers risked censorship and began to use film to speak out about the hypocrisy and absurdity of the Communist state. Ranging in style from the dazzlingly experimental to the arrestingly realistic, these new additions to our comprehensive Czechoslovak New Wave collection include four rediscovered gems by the great František Vláčil (Marketa Lazarová), the one-of-a-kind musical The Hop-Pickers, and a surreal riff on Gulliver’s Travels (Case for a Rookie Hangman)—joining such classics of the movement as Daisies, Loves of a Blonde, and Diamonds of the Night.

FEATURING: The White Dove (1960), The Devil’s Trap (1962), The Hop-Pickers (1964), The Unfortunate Bridegroom (1967), The Valley of the Bees (1968), Adelheid (1970), Case for a Rookie Hangman (1970), Four Murders Are Enough, Darling (1971)