Holiday Classics

Supermarket clerk Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) wakes on Christmas morning to discover her boyfriend dead — leaving a suicide note, a killer mix tape, and an unpublished manuscript. She erases his name, adds hers, and this parting gift becomes her ticket out of small-town Scotland to a new life.

It’s Christmas Day in 1560, and a group of Spanish conquistadors descends from the Incan Highlands in search of a fabled “lost city of gold” — and provisions run low by New Year's Eve. On a scout mission, a mercurial second-in-command officer becomes consumed with visions of domination and leads his army on a doomed quest into oblivion. Featuring a landmark score by Popul Vuh, the first of many collaborations with director Werner Herzog.

A sex worker tears through Tinseltown on Christmas Eve, searching for the pimp who broke her heart.

Christmas Night: Baltimore, 1959. Writer/director Barry Levinson’s semi-autobiographical nostalgic tale of a circle of friends coming to terms with their impending adulthood on the last week of the year. Screening in 35mm

Cousins Craig (Ice Cube) and Day-Day (Mike Epps) find themselves on the brink of eviction days before Christmas after being robbed by a crooked Santa. Down on their luck, the duo take on gigs as rent-a-cops at the local strip mall — soon finding themselves at odds with an assortment of enemies. Pizza and a Movie, co-presented with Slim & Husky’s Pizza Beeria. Screening in 35mm

WAKE IN FRIGHT: On a two-year post at a tiny school in the Outback, disgruntled middle school teacher John Grant longs to spend the holidays with his girlfriend back in Sydney, but gets stranded in transit — or swallowed whole, rather — in “The Yabba”, a beer-soaked station town where barbarism and vice have found a permanent home.

FIRST BLOOD: Before John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) was franchised into an ‘80s-era mold of ultra-violence, he was a transient Vietnam Vet passing through rural Washington to see a war buddy for the holidays. Arrested for vagrancy by local sheriff (Brian Dennehy) and provoked by excessive jailhouse indignities, his elite survival training kicks in — and a manhunt ensues.

In anime maestro Satoshi Kon’s re-retelling of the Three Wise Men story, three homeless individuals discover a baby at a garbage dump on Christmas Eve and wander the city in search of its parents.

A mysterious and charismatic driver for one of London’s most notorious crime families crosses paths with a midwife who has potentially damning evidence against the family, setting in motion a plan of deceit, death and retribution over the holidays.

A CIA researcher uncovers top secret information and finds himself marked for death in Sydney Pollack’s tense holiday-adjacent thriller.

When three outlaws on the run find a dying woman and her newborn baby in the desert, they vow to save the child in John Ford’s western reimagining of the story of the Three Wise Men. Screening in 35mm