Whodunits, Pride Month, Maverick Directors, and the French New Wave

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

John Waters

All hail the Pope of Trash! In June, we curated six films from cult film icon John Waters, who built a singular career making gleefully transgressive films that channeled the spirit of punk with their campy, satirical, unapologetic taste. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, where many of his early films were set, Waters started his career as an underground filmmaker in the 1970s, pushing the boundaries of censorship with his outrageous characters, situations and dialogue.

Waters became a cult figure with his self-labelled “Trash Trilogy” – Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and Desperate Living (1977), which became celebrated for the way they found the sublime in the ridiculous. As his career progressed, Waters’s work began appealing to a slightly more mainstream audience, but his films have always retained a strong sense of inventiveness and transgression, with bright, pop-punk imagery that leans into the absurd and finds comedy even in its characters’ darkest moments.

Check out this month’s selection of work from John Waters: crime comedies Multiple Maniacs (1970), Cecil B. Demented (2000), and Serial Mom (1994), musical comedy Hairspray (1998), and comedies Pecker (1998) and A Dirty Shame (2004).

FILM COLLECTION

Whodunit!?

Red herrings, multiple motives, wrong turns… this month, we dropped a selection of Whodunit films from across the years into our library. A classic plot-driven subgenre of mysteries, thrillers and crime films, whodunits are built on an archetypal structure that allows for a film’s individual voice to rise through its characters, settings and tonal variations.

There are five essentials to any whodunit: an inciting crime (which is often a murder), a lead detective character, a list of suspects with conflicting and overlapping motives, a progression of clues that the audience often learns alongside the detective, and some kind of revelation. While many films play with and twist these conventions (or sometimes ignore them completely!), they lie at the heart of the ingredient mix of any story that lives in this world. Check out our selection below!

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Sam Peckinpah

In June, we dropped thousands of shots into our library from seven films by Sam Peckinpah, whose revisionist Western films through the New Hollywood era became some of the most influential movies of their generation. Nicknamed “Bloody Sam” due to both the extreme violence of his films as well as his volatile temperament, Peckinpah served in the US Armed Forces before studying at USC’s Graduate Film School. He worked in a variety of roles, including acting, on productions in Los Angeles, before stepping into the directors chair himself.

Peckinpah’s films and television work dealt with issues of values and morality, but also presented brutally violent and nihilistic worlds. As a body of work, his films have influenced directors from John Woo to Quentin Tarantino and beyond, and have helped redefine cultural expectations around the Western genre. Check out this month’s curation of Peckinpah’s work: Ride the High Country (1962), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Convoy (1978), Cross of Iron (1977), Major Dundee (1965), The Getaway (1972), and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani

This month, we added stills from four films into our library from the shared work of French wife-and-husband filmmaking duo, Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani. Both born in 1976 in France, before meeting in Brussels, Belgium, the couple directed a number of self-produced short films before making their feature directorial debut with the Italian giallo-inspired Amer (2009).

The couple’s continued interest in crime genre stories, mixed with their bright, saturated visual sensibility has allowed them to carve out a unique niche as contemporary independent filmmakers, whose work has traveled around the world and serves as a model for filmmakers today. Enjoy the gorgeous visuals from The Stranger Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013), Let the Corpses Tan (2017), The ABCs of Death (2013), and Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025), and add them to your decks today!

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025)The ABCs of Death (2013)

Let the Corpses Tan (2017)The Stranger Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013)

FILM COLLECTION

French New Wave

In June, we curated a collection of thirteen lesser-known films from the French New Wave. The landmark European cinema movement of the late 1950s and 1960s helped to reshape modern cinema by rejecting traditional, formulaic studio films of the time in favor of “auteur theory”, radical editing patterns, and guerrilla-style on-location shooting with handheld cameras. The French New Wave ushered in a generation of storytellers and a set of stylistic norms that transformed moviemaking, inspiring filmmakers to tell their stories with what they had, who they knew, and where they were, instead of submitting to the broader apparatus of the studio system.

Take a closer look at some of these less well-known gems from the French New Wave, which bear all the same hallmarks as their more famous compatriots, and add them to your decks today!