For a small but dedicated cadre of fans, “Desperate Living,” John Waters’s fifth and most difficult to watch commercial feature, occupies the highest peak atop the director’s trash heap of a filmography. Waters described it as “a lesbian melodrama about revolution,” but Desperate Living managed to offend so many lesbians that their protests prevented it from being shown in Boston. It managed to offend nearly everyone else too, by pursuing violence and grossness further than any other film in Waters’s — and possibly anyone else’s — body of work. Cathartic, honest, relentless, and confrontational, the one and only John Water is here to illuminate and decapitate America as only he can. Come get wild with our season finale and HAPPY SOUTHERN DECADENCE Y’ALL!

The Fifth Element is a bold, bright, loud, rowdy, lush, extravagant science fiction space opera that wears its heart on its garish sleeve. Ready to wow, never taking itself too seriously, Luc Besson’s stunning vision hops centuries, galaxies, and every conventional wisdom in the sci-fi playbook to create one of the great roller coaster rides in cinema. Packed with insane visuals and stylized to the point of acid-trip absurdity, the film’s singular iconography remains utterly unforgettable over 25 years after its release.

Legendary Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics created a definitive masterpiece of world cinema with this psychedelic adaptation of Hungarian fairy tales. By turns astonishing and meditative, this kaleidoscopic medley of path-breaking animation follows mythic folk heroes Treeshaker, Stonecrumbler and Irontemperer as they descend into the perilous Underworld on an epic quest to battle the forces of ancient evil and save the cosmos.

The film will follow a screening of Young Boy, directed by Rachel Jacob, presented by The COOL Cooperative.

In this luminous semi-documentary film that plays on the border of reality and fiction, a young boy from the big city goes on an enchanted expedition to the Banco Chinchorro, the largest coral reef in Mexico. The boy’s wild-man father, who will return him to his Italian mother at the end of the trip, extends a ritualistic passing of knowledge, experience and love from one generation to the next. The characters in Alamar may be playing versions of themselves, but director Pedro González-Rubio has constructed a film in which the journey has an overarching mythic resonance that evokes fables from “Robinson Crusoe” to “The Old Man and the Sea.”

The film will follow a screening of Young Boy, directed by Rachel Jacob, presented by The COOL Cooperative.

Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, photographer, and multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Sans Soleil is his mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys from Africa to Japan.

The boundless imagination and physical marvels of the work of the German modern-dance pioneer Pina Bausch leap off the screen in this exuberant tribute by Wim Wenders. Enacted by a group of staggeringly talented dancers from her company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal, Pina is a remarkable and adventurous visual experience that highlights the bold legacy of one of the world’s true creative visionaries.

One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers with non -professional actors, elevated by one of Ennio Morricone’s most hearth-breaking and cathartic scores, the film is a case study in modern warfare with astonishing relevance today.

There is a general air of madness permeating every nook and cranny of Bunny Lake Is Missing. At this movie’s unhinged center is a skin-crawling brother-sister story, wrapped in a true-crime, missing-child package, inside of a parable of a woman being silenced into insanity. This movie is a textbook study in the perils of not believing a woman who is, rightfully, crawling up and down the walls of her mind as men point, scoff, and laugh. The “Psycho” of gaslighting with a bang-on soundtrack by the Zombies, is an often overlooked gem of the 1960s.

Double feature Thursday!

Tongues Untied, directed by Marlon Riggs (1989)

This radical blend of documentary and performance defies the stigmas surrounding Black gay sexuality in the belief that, as long as shame prevails, liberation cannot be possible. Through music and dance, words and poetry and by candid, humorous, and heartbreaking interviews with queer African American men—Tongues Untied gives voice to what it means to live as an outsider in both a Black community rife with homophobia and a largely white gay subculture poisoned by racism.

Lovers Rock, directed by Steve McQueen (2020)

A monsoon of musical and sexual rapture bursts overhead in this film from director Steve McQueen, leaving condensation-sweat running down the walls and cinematic pleasure going through the roof. Taking place over a single evening at a West Indian house party in 1980s London, the dance floor ignites a constellation of sexual sparks in its indoor cosmos. Lovers Rock is a cine-tab of MDMA, which through continuous immersion gradually ascends to something like an out-of-body experience.

Better know for the nightmarish, post apocalyptic Mad Max series, director George Miller brings the same heart-stopping action sequences, gonzo characters, and surrealist world building to the story of a good hearted pig on a mission to save the farm. What seems on the surface to be a cute children’s story, quickly veers into a terrifying adventure and a profound celebration of courage, loyalty, and joy. Hands down the greatest live action animal film ever made, this cult classic must be seen to be believed.

From within relentless fanfare and spectacle, Cabaret unearths the recurring nightmare of how people continue to live their lives in the face of encroaching authoritarianism and violence. The legendary Bob Fosse seduces his audience with a world of debauchery, sex, and elegance all while an overwhelming sense of evil creeps under the surface. A timeless, titanic achievement in cinema, Cabaret remains, 50 years after its release, a rare film that feels like only one person could have made it.

A bleak, timeless, nihilistic examination of nasty geo-politics from the rat’s eye view, in eye-popping jungle greens and punctuating broiling flames, William Friedkin’s 1977 thriller, in which four desperate men drive explosive nitroglycerin through an inhospitable jungle, is simply one of the craziest movies ever made. The suicide mission of the film’s characters is matched in madness by the film’s crew, who captured some of the most jaw-dropping, life-threatening sequences ever put on screen.

Former fighter John Huston’s ode to down-and-outters tells of a once promising boxer, now a washed up hopeless drunkard, who takes in a young talent played by a youthful Jeff Bridges. Eschewing the boxing film tropes of rivalry and glory, the film instead captures a bond that builds between two men, barely 10 years apart in age, one with a lifetime of emptiness ahead of him, one with an empty lifetime already behind. Raw, gritty, and gorgeously human, Fat City brilliantly portraits the universal tragedy of two worn-out losers just trying to get by.

This furiously paced drama illuminates the intricacies of the criminal underworld in contemporary Calabria from the perspective of fifteen year old Chiara. As she searches for the truth about her missing father, she’s caught between the sticky, sometimes lethal ties of blood and the impersonal, coldly rational benevolence of the state. This poetically, humanistically crafted drama challenges the mythology that keeps shadowy systems of gender and power in control of southern Italy and the world at large.

On the surface, Atlantique tells a familiar story of lovers kept apart by circumstances beyond their control, but Mati Diop’s astonishing debut quickly reveals cascading depths of feelings, meanings, gorgeous visuals, and hypnotic sounds. Its dimensions of strangeness foretell the return of a repressed Senegalese people living in the shadow of a huge, futurist luxury tower.  The film evolves into a docu-supernatural mystery that evokes themes of the refugee crisis, the exploitation of the poor, and the fetishization of virginity, purity, and marriage. 

Dito Montiel’s story of his boyhood growing up in Astoria, Queens in the 1980s is a coming-of-age story packed with raw, lyrical intensity - long, hot summer nights, flirting with girls, picking fights.  The brutality of surviving adolescence in a tough urban environment is wrenching and at times devastating, but A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints leaves you with that buoyant feeling of having encountered a raw, authentic work of art that is madly, defiantly, uncontrollably alive.

American audiences weren’t ready for Barbara Loden’s Wanda when it premiered in 1970. A stark portrait of a working-class woman, who breaks free of a miserable marriage only to find herself on the lam with an abusive bank robber, is now widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of independent cinema, and also as a cornerstone of women’s filmmaking. It’s a jagged, unvarnished, haunting portrait of social and psychological entrapment, that is borne out by the still-pathetic lack of opportunities for female directors in the American film industry.

A dysfunctional family makes a mad dash for the Turkish border to smuggle their older son out of the country in the debut feature from the son of legendary banned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Pahani. Though the political backdrop of families torn away from their loved ones remains strategically unspoken, Panahi generates a defiant sense of hope, humor, and freedom by simply capturing the love and commitment between the family and their impossibly cute, wide-eyed and long-lashed six-year-old trickster.

Long before the Beast started signing autographs in Orlando, Jean Cocteau crossed Xanadu with Dali to create one of the most magical of all films. Before the days of computer effects and modern creature makeup, these spectacular visions of enchantment, desire, and death, became timeless icons of cinematic wonder. Candelabras are being held by living human arms extending from the walls, statues are alive, gates and doors open themselves. Cocteau wanted to make a surrealist poem, a film that appeals through images rather than words, a story that takes the form of the familiar fable, but deals, as fairy tales do, with what we truly dread and desire. 

Before transitioning into his more widely know surrealist works (Songs from the Second Floor, You, The Living ), Roy Andersson debuted with this heart stopping tragicomic tale of teenage rebellion, romance, and the desperate hilarity of awakening sexual appetites. Its youngsters chain-smoke, motor-bike, kiss on the overpass in a hopeless quest for first love, all the while offering a grim prophesy of the unhappy adult lives they seek to escape.

This joyous, carnivalesque reminiscence renders daily life in a small Italian town as a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, and political subterfuge. Wandering and wild, Amarcord evokes a vanished world haloed with the glow of fictionalized and inflated memories. Says the magical naturalist, poetic humanist Federico Fellini about the film’s supposed autobiographical nature “I’m a liar, but an honest one.”

When the going gets tough, the tough find other women in this furiously feminist gonzo comedy pulsing with fist pumping ABBA jams, Aussie mania, and an irrepressible tour de force from Toni Colette. Empowering as it is joyous, this crown jewel of the 90s romantic comedies is a reminder that our female friendships are so often what pull us through.

Dress code : Wedding formal or ABBA (or both)

A warm, madcap comedy mediating on the perfect bowl of noodles, Tampopo is a food porn, a ramen western, a world where sex, death, and hunger are always inseparable. Egg yolks pass between lovers’ lips, prawns drown in cognac on a bare stomach, and at each turn the wild and deviant are celebrated for choosing to eat, and to live, in a manner that breaks with societal norms—for embracing their appetites, odd as they may be, in their delicious totality.

A young school teacher marooned in the outback descends into a frenzied spiral of drunken madness in the dark heart of white Australia. Know as the countries “great lost film,” Wake in Fright was reviled, forgotten and almost destroyed forever before its metric resurrection in 2009. Nightmarish, brutally real, and infinitely fascinating, this is a film that goes for broke and says to hell with the consequences.

*TW - The film contains documentary footage of a real kangaroo hunt that can be disturbing to some viewers.*

Come shake off the mardi-gras cobwebs with an escape into a surrealist society populated by deep sea divers, performing fleas, and cyclops men; a malevolent scientist who kidnaps children to steal their dreams, a small girl and a large, adult man who form a delicate, platonic romance on their mission to save her stolen brother. Twisted, spectacular, and breathtakingly unique, City of Lost Children is one that will haunt you forever.

Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit plays out. Claire Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable films in all of modern cinema.

In this electrifying blend of documentary and fiction, an aged-out stripper with a mean streak and a hard past wrestles with choosing love or the endless party. A force of nature and a study in trouble, it’s star Sonia Theis plays herself amongst her four real-life children—including Samuel Theis, one of the film’s co-directors.

Shot over 4 years and in 28 countries, Tarsem’s “The Fall” is an impossible movie and a testament to the power of storytelling. It is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. It’s unfathomably epic tale springs from the yarns of an injured stunt man trying to con a young girl into sneaking him extra morphine.

Made in the spirit of pure, uninhibited play, this free-flowing dual portrait unfolds as a shared reverie between two women as they collapse the boundaries between artist and subject. Exploring aging and the passing of time —Jane B. par Agnès V. contrasts the private, reflective Jane Birkin with Birkin the icon, as Varda casts her variously as a classical muse, a femme fatale, a Spanish dancer, and even Joan of Arc.

Keanu Reeves takes River Phoenix on a quest along the grungy streets and open highways of the Pacific Northwest, navigating a volatile world of junkies, thieves, and johns. Visually dazzling and thematically groundbreaking, My Own Private Idaho is a deeply moving look at unrequited love and life on society’s margins.