It’s probably not by design, but this year’s selection of films presented by the New York Film Critics Circle at the American Museum of the Moving Image opens with a telling incongruity. The series, an annual event in which individual members pick and introduce older movies, has selected “Breaking Boundaries” as its title for this year, focusing on “transgressive” works that have broken taboos and scandalized audiences over time. But it begins with screenings of newer films that the Circle has given its awards to, and a less transgressive, more mainstream lot would be harder to find.

That’s not to say that this year’s award winners – which include Alexander Payne’s indie juggernaut “Sideways” (screening January 8 with stars Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, and Virginia Madsen in person), Zhang Yimou’s long-shelved martial-arts epic “Hero” (January 8), and the Pixar blockbuster “The Incredibles” (screening January 9, with director Brad Bird in person) are bad, by any means. But they do provide a marked contrast to the genuinely startling fare on offer throughout the rest of the series.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Mr. Payne’s own “Citizen Ruth,” from 1996 (which will be introduced by Newsday’s John Anderson on January 15), a caustic comedy about the abortion battle in which a pregnant glue-sniffer (played with animalistic fervor by Laura Dern) becomes the center of a political tug-of-war between Bible-thumping abortion foes and New Agey pro-choice activists.

Mr. Payne’s films often balance between pointed satire and unexpected compassion. Here, he riotously portrays the opposing sides in the abortion-rights battle, pitting a simple, devout, yet hypocritical group of protesters named the “Babysavers” against an intelligent yet loopy group of liberal activists. It’s a film with an edgy topicality all but absent from Mr. Payne’s recent work. Still, the equal-opportunity mockery of “Citizen Ruth” went largely unrewarded back in its day, even from this batch of sometimes controversial New York critics.

“Breaking Boundaries” does have its share of acclaimed classics – miles of ink have already been spilled over Martin Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece “Taxi Driver” (introduced by Newsday’s Gene Seymour February 13) and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 shocker “Psycho” (introduced by the New York Press’s Matt Zoller Seitz on January 29). Probably the only thing to say about these films is that there aren’t any excuses left for not having seen them.

Far more controversial is a more recent awards-no-show, Gaspar Noe’s “Irreversible” (introduced by Christian Science Monitor’s David Sterritt, February 5), perhaps the most shocking film of the past few years. Proceeding backwards in time, “Irreversible” begins with a horrifically graphic act of revenge inside a gay nightclub, then works its way back to the grisly act that provoked it, and beyond (or, rather, before).

Shot in queasiness-inducing, handheld long takes that suggest a point-of-view descent into Hell, Mr. Noe’s film is about genuine emotional and physical transgression in all its forms – between strangers, friends, and even lovers. But for all its bleakness, it ends on a strangely optimistic note, suggesting the backwards progression of its plot is no gimmick but an elaborate allegory of human redemption.

Significantly less redemptive is John Waters’s “Pink Flamingos” (introduced by the Star’s Marshall Fine, January 30), once dubbed “the sickest movie ever made.” A rough-hewn cavalcade of grotesquerie in which the infamous female impersonator (and Waters regular) Divine heads a family of white-trash delinquents, the 1972 cult favorite features everything from bestiality and rape to castration and cannibalism, topping it off with a final image of Divine eating actual dog feces.

The point? None, really: Shooting with all the visual panache of a 12-year-old trying out the family’s new Super 8 camera, Mr. Waters mocks narrative filmmaking the same way that Divine’s appearance, with her ridiculously arched eyebrows and her tight-fitting dresses stretched over a seal-shaped frame, mocks femininity. In that sense, “Pink Flamingos” is the most purely transgressive film on this schedule, an intentional affront to cinema that must be seen to be believed.

A lot of the same elements Mr. Waters’s film plays for juvenile laughs are given dead-serious treatment in the series’ most disturbing film, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (presented by The New York Sun’s own Nathan Lee, January 22). Updating Marquis de Sade’s novel to the final days of fascist Italy, Pasolini’s film concerns four powerful officials who gather a group of young boys and girls and proceed to humiliate, torture, rape, and murder them in ornately gruesome ways.

The 1976 film is, on the surface, yet another denunciation of Fascism; it came on the heels of numerous Italian films that laid bare the sexual perversions of Nazi ideology, such as “The Damned” (1969) and “The Night Porter” (1974). But Pasolini seems less interested in historical Fascism and more in the way that consumption and power run amok reduce human beings to faceless objects. The camera often keeps its distance from the ghastly proceedings – often shooting through windows and, in one audacious scene, through a pair of binoculars – which has the surprising effect of making the horrors on display that much more unbearable.

At the time of its release, the film presented an additional note of sorrow: Pasolini had been found bludgeoned to death soon after finishing it. Today, “Salo’s” poignancy comes not from its creator’s sad fate, but of its images’ remarkable similarity to the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In that sense, it demonstrates the power of such shocking works to lay bare dark truths about our own selves.

Until February 13 (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, 718-784-4520).