December’s Criterion Collection slate opens with “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” a film of pure absurdist delight and eccentricity that launched Tim Burton’s directing career and forever enshrined Paul Reubens’ manic alter ego as a pop-cultural folk hero. What starts as a quest to reclaim a stolen bicycle unfolds as a delirious road trip stitched together with cartoon logic, surreal detours, and a parade of kitschy Americana. Burton’s flair for the gothic and the grotesque is already fully formed in his debut, and the film also marked the beginning of his long collaboration with Danny Elfman, whose antic, carnivalesque score is now as indelible as Pee-wee’s bow tie. Four decades on, it still plays like a gleefully uncontainable ode to imagination and outsider joy.
“David Byrne’s American Utopia” then shifts the tone into ecstatic communion. Captured by Spike Lee, Byrne’s Broadway reimagining of his acclaimed concert tour strips the stage bare, populating it only with barefoot musicians, spare choreography by Annie-B Parson, and songs spanning Talking Heads classics to recent work. Shot with immersive intimacy, the film transforms performance into both political statement and communal ritual, balancing moments of protest with sequences of collective grace. Byrne, ever the eccentric prophet, makes the case for music as unity, as transformation, as utopia.
Criterion also turns its gaze back to the 1920s avant-garde with “Return to Reason,” a suite of four dream-films by Man Ray (Le retour à la raison, Emak bakia, L’étoile de mer, Les mystères du château du dé). Bursting with surreal montage, tactile experiment, and cryptic eroticism, these shorts are newly paired with an ethereal score by SQÜRL, the noise-rock duo of Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan. What was once silent, jittery, and uncanny is reborn as something both archival and alive—like opening a time capsule and finding it humming with new frequencies.
Already in the collection as a Blu-Ray, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger craft one of cinema’s most cherished romances, “I Know Where I’m Going!” (1945), moves up to a 4k Edition. In the film, Wendy Hiller’s ambitious Joan, bound for marriage with a wealthy industrialist, is stalled by a storm in the Scottish Hebrides, where she collides with Roger Livesey’s naval officer and a landscape steeped in myth. The film’s lyrical black-and-white images, newly restored under the stewardship of Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker Powell, remain a stirring meditation on fate, desire, and the tug-of-war between head and heart.
From antic comedy to screwball velocity, “His Girl Friday” (1940) stands as one of the fastest and funniest American films ever made, and its upgrade to a 4K version. Howard Hawks’ decision to reimagine reporter Hildy Johnson as Rosalind Russell gave the film’s newsroom satire a gendered spark, sharpening the repartee between Hildy and her editor/ex-husband Walter Burns, played with sly bravado by Cary Grant. The result is an immortal hybrid of press-room cynicism and remarriage comedy. Criterion enriches the release by pairing it with Lewis Milestone’s 1931 take on “The Front Page,” showing how adaptable and combustible the material remains.
Finally, Mira Nair’s “Salaam Bombay!” (1988) is a vivid, heartbreaking portrait of Bombay’s street children. Shot on location with nonprofessional actors drawn from the streets, the film fuses documentary immediacy with narrative poignancy. Following young Krishna (played by Shafiq Syed) as he navigates poverty, friendship, and survival, Nair crafts a kaleidoscopic work that brims with resilience, empathy, and unflinching honesty—an early sign of her place among world cinema’s most humane voices.
Criterion’s December lineup plays like a chorus of cinema’s extremes—screwball repartee, surrealist abstraction, windswept romance, street-level realism, concert-film ecstasy, and Pee-wee’s anarchic invention—closing out the year on a note of dazzling eclecticism.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
