Rue the Christmas blues no more — the Criterion Channel has you covered with plenty of great films to stream this holiday season thanks to the platform’s December lineup.
As announced on Wednesday, Criterion Channel starting December 1 will host a greatest-hits collection of “Pope of Trash” John Waters’ most iconic movies. Divine-starring classics such as “Multiple Maniacs” (1970), “Female Trouble” (1974), “Hairspray” (1988), and “Polyester” (1981) fit the bill, while you shouldn’t miss a camped-up Kathleen Turner as a murderous suburban matriarch in “Serial Mom,” a role her agents told her would ruin her career. Well, the rest is history. For a bonus, John Waters also provides interview commentary on a selection of some of his own favorite movies, including Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 “Brink of Life,” Samuel Fuller’s 1964 “The Naked Kiss,” and Barbara Loden’s influential 1970 classic “Wanda.”
Elsewhere, Criterion Channel celebrates five decades of Alfred Hitchcock’s career with a murderer’s row of all-timers, from “The Lodger” (1972) to “The 39 Steps” (1935), “The Lady Vanishes” (1938), “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943), “Rope” (1948), “Rear Window” (1954), and, of course, “Vertigo” (1958) and “North by Northwest” (1959) among many more. In other words, all cozy, comfy favorites, even if their subtexts and the Master of Suspense’s direction don’t exactly scream, “Happy holidays!”
Criterion has also programmed a series of films around the theme of “Déjà Vu” — which, of course, means Chris Marker, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Terry Gilliam, Richard Kelly, Christopher Nolan, and David Lynch all get a spotlight for their woozy, romantic, and terrifying visions of memory gone awry. Bertrand Bonello’s A.I. satire and life-in-L.A.-is-hell odyssey “The Beast,” one of the very best films of 2024, is already streaming on Criterion Channel but joins this coterie of memory-distorting masterworks.
Meanwhile, Criterion Channel sets you up to enjoy a handful of pre-Code classics from Columbia Pictures, movies that embraced sleaze and sin not long before the hammer of Hollywood puritanism dropped. Frank Capra’s “Ladies of Leisure” (1930) and “Forbidden” (1932), plus William Beaudine’s “Three Wise Girls” (1932) will be available to stream.
If you’re looking to languish in some ’90s and early-2000s nostalgia, a program of MTV movies also arrives on Criterion Channel this December, including Mike Judge’s “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America” (1996) and Jeff Tremaine’s 2002 original “Jackass: The Movie.”
Making its exclusive streaming premiere in December is the mosaic-like, must-see Iranian drama “Terrestrial Verses,” the only Iranian movie to premiere at Cannes in 2023. Directors Alireza Khatami and Ali Asgari thread nine icepick-precise vignettes about the petty bureaucracies of working-class life in Iran in this compact and powerful feature.
Head over to the Criterion Channel’s official website for the full December 2024 lineup.
