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A sort-of sequel to Wong’s Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love, the ’60s-set 2046 revisits Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s Chow, now a suave science-fiction writer, to chronicle his various affairs with women (including Faye Wong, Zhang Ziyi, and Gong Li), acting as distractions now that his true love, Mrs. Chen (Maggie Cheung, seen in flashback), has disappeared. Intercutting scenes from Chow’s footloose life—several of these taking place on subsequent Christmas Eves—with scenes from his novel-in-progress, set in the titular year, it’s a film of voluptuous melancholy.
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Billy the Kid, and things only get stranger from there in Moullet’s newly restored, slapstick Bouillabaisse Western, which follows Léaud’s loony Billy across the rugged terrain of the Hautes Alps, fleeing the law and hostile natives with the sultry Rachel Kersterber, first at his side, then on his tail. A cockeyed genre-bending comedy that owes more to B-movie oaters than to John Ford and more to Chuck Jones than either, in which every cut to a new deliberate misframing—courtesy of editor Jean Eustache—might as well come with a punchline rimshot, boasting an off-key theme song and harmonium-esque score by the director’s brother, Patrice, of the cult group Alpes.
Film restored by La Traverse with the assistance of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC). Restorations carried out by Cosmodigital and L.E. Diapason and distributed in North America by Cinema Guild.
A Cinema Guild release
Frequently approximating the point-of-view of its young protagonists, two siblings sent to stay with their grandfather in lush rural Taiwan while their hospitalized mother recuperates from a lingering illness, the first film in Hou’s coming-of-age trilogy (rounded out by Dust in the Wind and A Time to Live, a Time to Die), in spite of the air of wistful reminiscence suggested by its title, is a film that keenly recalls just how terrifying the world of adults can look when glimpsed by the curious eyes of children. The sun-dappled scenery of the countryside is enchanting, yes, but Hou is just as much concerned here with the things that lurk in the shadows…
Introduction by programmer Edo Choi on Sunday, December 21st
Arguably the film in which all the elements of Hou’s meticulously controlled, objectively distanced mature style identifiably coalesce, and his first collaboration with crucial cohort Lee, the deeply personal coming-of-age story A Time to Live, a Time to Die—which Hou periodically narrates himself—draws on his family’s experience of relocating to rural Taiwan from mainland China in the late ’40s, following the character of immigrant Ah-hsiao through some 20 years that encompass childhood self-discovery, adolescent rebellion, and the eventual compromises, regrets, and compensations of adulthood. “Working in long takes and wide-screen, deep-focus compositions that frame the characters from a discreet distance, Hou allows the locations to seep into our own memories and experience, so that… we come to know them almost as intimately as touchstones in our own lives.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Introduction by programmer Edo Choi on Sunday, December 21st
Adapted from a manga by Yoshiie Gōda, Kore-eda’s bittersweet modern-day fable of urban anomie and objectification—a little-seen outlier in the Japanese master’s filmography, featuring fleet mobile camerawork and a glossy pop art color palette courtesy of Lee—sets its scene in Tokyo, where a life-sized blow-up doll (The Host’s Bae Doo-na), after years of silently serving as the lone companion of her hermit-like middle-aged owner, one day mysteriously springs to life, setting out to see the outside world for the first time and discovering romance with video store clerk Arata Iura… as well as the dangers of real-world love.
Distributor: Dekanalog
Eddie Constantine’s B-movie private dick Lemmy Caution finds himself on the toughest case of his career, on the trail of rogue scientist Professor von Braun, the inventor of Alpha 60, a sentient computer that keeps tabs on the citizenry of “Alphaville”—a contemporary Paris shot by cinematographer Raoul Coutard as a cold glass-and-steel city of the future. A dystopian dazzler from Godard, with Anna Karina, as von Braun’s daughter, accompanying Caution in his investigation.
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
The first of Guerra’s three collaborations with Fellini, who he had been born only two months before and a few miles away from, is an affectionate, richly sensual film reminiscence of a year in the life of the bygone world of its director’s adolescence—a middle-class household in the Adriatic coast town of Rimini in the 1930s. Fellini's film is collection of quotidian anecdotes and larger-than-life daydreams, as befits a movie that aims to approximate the atmosphere of the collective fantasy that was Mussolini’s Italy. Nino Rota’s score sets the time, while Fellini’s gliding camera tracks an intricate dance of the hundreds of social rounds that make up the daily life of a city.
Distributor: Janus Films
Almost 20 years after his 1939 Love Affair, McCarey returned to the same story—that of a jaded fortune-hunting roué and unhappily engaged woman who meet on a transatlantic liner, are redeemed in love for one another, then separated by tragedy—which proved every bit as gutting (and popular with audiences) in Technicolor and CinemaScope. Cary Grant, who urged the remake, and Deborah Kerr take over from the original’s twosome of Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, and while arguments can be and have been made for the superiority of one pairing or the other, we’re more than happy to have them both.
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Bong’s debut feature is the work of a preternaturally talented filmmaker already in full command of his medium—and alert to the issues of economic and class disparity that he would continue to explore in works like 2019’s Parasite. The darkly comic, melancholic, and altogether disquieting story of an unemployed young academic (Lee Sung-jae), henpecked into submission by his pregnant wife, whose annoyance with life in general and the endless ambient yapping of a neighboring pooch in particular drives him to desperate extremes—his actions attracting the attention of Bae Doona’s character, a maintenance worker in his building who sees her chance to play sleuth (and perhaps win television news fame) when residents’ dogs start disappearing.
Distributor: Magnolia Pictures
While so many special effects spectacles are lost in time like tears in the rain, Blade Runner remains the template for imagining the neon-wreathed downer of the future, every bit as influential in its vision as was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis over a half century before. Working from a novel by cult writer Philip K. Dick to create a film that would become the gold standard for sci-fi noir, director Scott shares credit here with “visual futurist” Syd Mead’s design concepts and synth pioneer Vangelis’s atmospheric score.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
A singularly downbeat home-for-the-holidays movie, Baron’s grungy independently produced noir concerns solitary tight-lipped hitman, Frank “Baby Boy” Bono (Baron himself), embarking on a Christmas week assignment for the Cleveland mob in his old stomping grounds of Manhattan, his perambulations—and doomy inner life—accompanied by wall-to-wall second-person (!) narration courtesy the gravel-voiced Lionel Stander. A chilled-to-the-bone deathtrip trawl across the city, with destinations that include the old Penn Station, the Village Gate jazz club, the glowing display windows of Fifth Avenue, and the mafia boneyard that is the Jamaica Bay estuary, all photographed in melancholic monochrome by cinematographer/producer Merrill Brody, whose work hews closer to the semidocumentary style of Cassavetes’s Shadows than to the carefully sculpted Expressionist lighting of the studio-bound thriller.
Distributor: Universal
A Metrograph holiday tradition, back by popular demand. It starts at Frankenberg’s department store, and an exchange of glances between Carol and the girl behind the counter (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, both sublime), a look that tangles up fantasies of commercial acquisition and desire. What follows is maybe the finest romance this century has yet produced, an agonizingly slow seduction where the act of shopping for and decorating a Christmas tree becomes an intensely erotic act, and delayed consummation is packed with all the anticipation that a child has for finally unwrapping a present.
A Metrograph holiday tradition, back by popular demand. It starts at Frankenberg’s department store, and an exchange of glances between Carol and the girl behind the counter (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, both sublime), a look that tangles up fantasies of commercial acquisition and desire. What follows is maybe the finest romance this century has yet produced, an agonizingly slow seduction where the act of shopping for and decorating a Christmas tree becomes an intensely erotic act, and delayed consummation is packed with all the anticipation that a child has for finally unwrapping a present.
A hot-shot to the heart, pop masterpiece Chungking Express tells the stories of two lovelorn cops (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung) and the women who baffle them (Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong, who contributes a Cantopop cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams”), its bifurcated structure suggesting the A- and B-sides of a 45. Wong’s international breakthrough introduced new audiences to his rich, sensorial brand of filmmaking, inviting one to disappear into, sink into, live inside, a voluptuary world bigger and brighter than our own—but just as heartbreaking.
Distributor: Janus FIlms
Bae Doona joins a formidable ensemble cast that includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, and Hugh Grant, each taking on multiple roles, in the Wachowsky’s and Tykwer’s madly ambitious, epoch-spanning adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel of the same name, their film shuttling back and forth along a timeline whose various stopoffs include an attorney’s awakening to the abolitionist cause on the mid-19th century Chatham Islands, a composer’s creative agonies in immediately pre-World War II Britain, and the rebellion of a humanoid “fabricant” Sonmi-451 (Bae), in the totalitarian Neo Seoul of 2144. Pilloried by some, the ultimate film maudit to others, declared “daring and visionary” by an ebullient Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, and without question the only 21st-century blockbuster to garner comparison to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, say what you will, there is only one Cloud Atlas.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
An exquisite, sensual, and achingly personal work of art from the late, great Davies, set in Davies’s hometown of Liverpool in the 1950s. The directorial surrogate is young Bud, a movie-mad child on the verge of sexual awakening, and in one unforgettable bravura sequence, set to Debbie Reynold’s “Tammy,” Davies brings together the three formative spaces of he and Bud’s youths: the church, the classroom, and the cinema.
35mm print courtesy of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts Moving Image Archives.
Distributor: AGFA
Young lovers Wan and Huen, fresh out of junior high school in the remote, mountainous mining town where they were raised, look forward to a bright future together in their new home of Taipei—only to face first the grim reality of urban life there, then a three-year separation, after Wan is drafted into the Republic of China Army, which ultimately proves fatal to their affections. Based on the personal experiences of frequent Hou co-screenwriter Wu Nien-jen, the poignant, plangent Dust in the Wind has emerged as a popular favorite among Hou’s films, his first collaboration with composer Chen Ming-chang and actor Li Tian-lu, which also features some of Mark Lee Ping-bing’s most hypnotically beautiful tracking shots.
Introduction by programmer Edo Choi on Sunday, December 21st
Christmas lights take on a malevolent gleam in Kubrick’s final masterpiece, a free adaptation of Dream Story, Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella of erotic compulsion. Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) hits the shivering streets of a dreamlike “Manhattan”—doubled for by London, with second-unit work in NYC courtesy of Arthur Jafa—after a pot-hazy domestic bust-up with wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), setting out on an odyssey to ease his bruised male ego that will lead him to what is certainly the freakiest Christmas party in all of cinema. The password at the box office is “Fidelio.”
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Spend the Christmas Eve of 1907—and the aftermath of the sumptuous celebration—at the Ekdahl family home, as seen through the eyes of two of the massive clan’s smallest members, played by Pernilla Allwin and Bertil Guve, in Bergman’s intimate epic of holiday warmth and wintery family frigidity. A tender but clear-eyed recreation of northern European bourgeois life in the early years of the 20th century, evoking both its nourishing hearthside pleasures and the pinching pains inflicted by Puritan self-denial.
Please note: There will be a 15-minute intermission after Episode 2.
Distributor: Janus Films
Anderson adapted Roald Dahl for the first but not the last time in this charmingly homespun stop-motion production boasting a menagerie of animal heroes and villains. Not just Anderson’s debut venture into animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox was the closest thing he’d done to-date to a pure genre piece—a stylish, taut heist picture, with retired game bird thief Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney), fed up with domesticity, deciding to take one last job, and bringing down a world of trouble on his family in the process. With its distinctly autumnal palette of oranges, reds, golds, and browns, references to harvest-time and cider-making, and general air of convivial cheer, a film that fits the fall holidays like a well-worn sweater.
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Crackpot inventor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) purchases a pet mogwai—that’s Cantonese for “devil,” by the way—from a Chinatown vendor as a Christmas gift for son Billy (Zach Galligan), but when Gizmo’s new owners fail to follow strict instructions for the cute l’il guy’s maintenance, it’ll be hell to pay for the residents of the sleepy hamlet of Kingston Falls… and their lawn decorations. A festive black-comic horror romp with more than a little Looney Tunes in its DNA, with Billy’s Yuletide-phobic girlfriend, Kate (Phoebe Cates), unpacking the childhood trauma of her Santa Claus–costumed father’s fatal journey down the family chimney one among scores of memorably nasty bits of business.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
In a near-future Tokyo, two rambunctious high school pals with graduation—and uncertain-at-best prospects—on the near horizon reckon with the fallout of a prank played on their principal and the daily looming threat of a catastrophic earthquake. The fiction feature debut by Sora (Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus), lauded upon its premiere at last year’s Venice International Film Festival, is at once a poignant, delicately modulated coming-of-age drama of foundering friendship and a cutting cautionary tale concerning the incursion of surveillance technology into all aspects of everyday life, intelligently employing its schoolyard setting as a microcosm of Japanese society and its rankling socio-political and environmental anxieties.
A Film Movement release
Introduction by producer Albert Tholen and cinematographer Bill Kirstein on Tuesday, December 23rd
Celebrate the holidays with Fleischer Studios, home of Betty Boop, Popeye, Bimbo, and a barbed, surrealist sense of humor. Featuring Modeling, in which Koko the Clown escapes Max Fleischer’s pen to run amok; Christmas Comes but Once a Year, in which Boop series regular Grampy has a solo outing saving Christmas for the residents of an orphanage; Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, an utterly charming visualization of Robert L. May’s 1939 poem of the same name; Thrills and Chills, in which Mme. Boop and her dog Pudgy find themselves in deep trouble while staying at a ski resort; Somewhere in Dreamland, the Fleischers’ first venture into three-strip Technicolor, in which two impoverished children of the Great Depression frolic through an imaginary land made of sweet comestibles; and Ker Choo, in which we witness a stock car race featuring La Boop, Koko, and Bimbo among the competitors.
Modeling (Dave Fleischer, 1921, 7 mins)
Christmas Comes But Once a Year (Dave Fleischer, Seymour Kneitel, 1936, 9 mins)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Max Fleischer, 1948, 8 mins)
Thrills and Chills (Dave Fleischer, Roland Crandall, 1938, 6 mins)
Somewhere in Dreamland (Dave Fleischer, Seymour Kneitel, 1935, 9 mins)
Ker Choo (Dave Fleischer, Seymour Kneitel, 1933, 6 mins)
Snow-White (Dave Fleischer, Roland Crandall, 1933, 7 mins)
Seasin's Greetinks! (Dave Fleischer, Seymour Kneitel, 1933, 6 mins)
One of Kurosawa’s very greatest achievements, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate, affirming life through an exploration of death. Takashi Shimura brings a sublime pathos to his portrayal of an aging Tokyo bureaucrat who, after being diagnosed with stomach cancer, is compelled to find meaning in his final remaining days. Presented in a radically conceived two-part structure and shot with a perceptive, humanistic clarity of vision, Ikiru is a rich, multifaceted look at what it means to truly have lived.
Distributor: Janus Films
Wong’s arthouse smash is the very simple tale of two people in early ’60s Hong Kong, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Mrs. Chen (Maggie Cheung), drawn to one another by the discovery that their spouses are getting together on the side. A little story, full of little details, all surrounding a love affair that isn’t really a love affair—but throbbing with huge, aching emotions that it can barely contain. It might just break your heart.
Distributor: Janus Films
Hailed by critic Pauline Kael as “a beautiful pipe dream of a movie,” Altman’s snowbound Western plays out in the ramshackle Washington frontier town of Presbyterian, where extravagantly fur-coated wandering gambler Warren Beatty decides to stick around after striking up a partnership with Julie Christie’s madam, a fraught but profitable teaming that’s threatened by encroaching corporate interests. A film of indelible ambience, thanks to the uniquely foggy photography of Vilmos Zsigmond, achieved by “flashing” the negative before exposure, the droning vocals of Leonard Cohen repeatedly flooding the soundtrack, and the abiding air of wintery chill.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
A stylish and seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel stars Shu Qi (The Assassin) as an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards Jack Kao’s suave, sensitive gangster. Structured as a flashback to the then-present from the then-future of 2011, it’s a transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration, and a nagging undercurrent of ennui. Hou and longtime cinematographer Lee here break from their familiar pattern of elegantly composed long shot long takes to create something both more intimate and hectic, a film whose shallow-focus images, jittery camerawork, and cramped locations evoke both the claustrophobic character of Taiwan’s capital city and, in Lee’s words, “the feeling of youth.”
Distributor: Metrograph Pictures
One of the key scenes in Anderson’s evocation of the world of haute couture in postwar England takes place at a riotously colorful New Year’s Eve ball, but the film itself qualifies for inclusion in a holiday series by virtue of having the quality of a gift opening, with each scene unveiling new sensorial sartorial pleasures. A battle of wills between dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), and his muse, Alma (Vicky Krieps), Anderson’s movie has already taken on the burnished glow of a classic.
Distributor: Universal
Jia’s intimate epic begins in and returns to the director’s hometown of Fenyang, Shanxi Province, where it picks up with a theatre troupe first encountered in the late ’70s, following them through changes in fashion over the course of a decade as they are scattered to the wind and finally return, along the way tracking the social shifts that accompany China’s move from the wake of the Cultural Revolution to the threshold of market capitalism. “It’s Pop Art as history.” —J. Hoberman
35mm print courtesy of Curzon Film
Distributor: Janus Films
Keanu Reeves stars as Johnny Utah, an FBI agent who goes undercover among the beach bums in order to investigate a hunch about surfers who are possibly moonlighting as bank robbers, in the film that cemented Reeves as a new, very California cool kind of action star. With Patrick Swayze as the group’s guru and kingpin, Bigelow’s Point Break is the kind of smart, fun, sexy, exciting action film desperately lacking in today’s Hollywood.
New 4K restoration courtesy of Shout! Factory in association with Resurgence Media Group.
Easily the most harrowing divorce drama ever made, Zuławski’s one-of-a-kind genre pastiche has spy Sam Neill returning to his Berlin home from a mission abroad to discover that wife Isabelle Adjani wants suddenly to split up. Launching an investigation into the reasons for her ever-more-alarming behavior, he discovers a truth more sinister (and nauseating) than his wildest suspicions, as Zuławski’s highly-choreographed cinematic delirium and Andrzej Korzyński’s pulsating score push things light years past over-the-top. Adjani won a César for her performance, one of the most grueling ever caught on film, though later reflected that the palpable ordeal she put herself through on the movie was nearly enough to make her leave acting behind.
Distributor: Metrograph Pictures
Walter Elias Disney had taken risks in his professional life before, some of them quite substantive, but never, before or after, would he put all his chips on the table in the way that he did with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It would be the first feature-length cel animation film, and every penny Disney had—and quite a few he’d begged or borrowed—were sunk into it. It required years of labor by a dedicated pool of artisans to complete and, had it been upon its release anything other than a massive cultural phenomenon, it would have sunk Walt Disney Productions. The end result, however, was a consummate Technicolor charmer whose every stained glass-vivid frame shows the tremulous, loving touch of the men and women who’d painstakingly brought it to life. The exuberant, long sustained opening note of the Dwarfs’ “Heigh-Ho” encapsulates the spirit of the thing: a celebration of the pleasure of work; the pride taken in a job not just well done, but done better than anyone else could do it.
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
The debut feature from Jeong, one of a handful of female directors to break into the South Korean film industry, focuses on five young women, recent high school graduates living in the industrial port city of Incheon and facing a precarious future together, in addition to having to handle the practical exigencies of caring for the feline that they’ve communally adopted. Bae, whose Tae-hee makes ends meet with shifts at her family’s sauna and occasional work as a typist for a cerebral palsy-afflicted poet, anchors an exceedingly fine ensemble cast in Jeong’s moving drama of fraying friendships and economic uncertainty, also one of the first films to acknowledge the increasingly central role of text messaging in 21st-century communication and find a way to integrate this new, faceless form of “keeping in touch” into a filmed narrative.
Three young Americans—idle rich boy Jim (John Gilbert), construction worker Slim (Karl Dane), and barkeep Bull (Tom O’Brien)—set out for the battlefields of World War I with dreams of glory, only to discover a reality horrible beyond imagination, in Vidor’s tale of innocence and harrowing experience, by turns touching (as in Jim’s courtship of French farm girl Renée Adorée) and terrifying (as in the trio’s ominous march through the woods towards their first bitter taste of battle). Arguably the filmed war drama that set the standard for all to follow, with Gilbert giving one of the silent screen’s most devastating performances, The Big Parade was also a cultural phenomenon, among its many admirers the painter Andrew Wyeth, who claimed to have watched it 180 times and to have drawn profound inspiration from Vidor’s singular eye for composing landscape.
Writer-director Wang draws from her own life experience in this funny, frank, and heartfelt diaspora drama, a Sundance sensation starring Crazy Rich Asians’s Awkwafina. Chinese American writer Billi, en route to a family reunion to Changchun, must unhappily play along with her parents’ plan to conceal a terminal cancer diagnosis from her beloved grandmother. A breakout performance for Awkwafina, who reveals a real capacity for pathos in this family-friendly, culture-clash tragicomedy.
Distributor: A24
The second feature that Chaplin released under the aegis of United Artists, the studio he’d co-founded with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith in 1919, The Gold Rush was made with the writer-director-star’s total creative control, and as a result his film, concerning The Tramp’s holing up with prospector Mack Swain to pan for gold in turn-of-the-last-century Alaska, is stuffed to bursting with memorable bits of business: the lopsided cabin perched on the edge of eternity, the dancing bread rolls, Chaplin’s transformation into a giant chicken and yes, of course, that delectable shoe. “A comedy with streaks of poetry, pathos, tenderness, linked with brusqueness and boisterousness. It is the outstanding gem of all Chaplin's pictures.” —The New York Times
Distributor: Janus Films
An exquisite, sensual, and achingly personal work of art from Davies, set in the director’s hometown of Liverpool as remembered from the 1950s of his youth—a drab urban environment where the markers of postwar austerity are everywhere evident, but also an environment where snatches of furtive beauty could be found by those who sought them and where the spirit of fellow feeling among working-class Britons, as embodied by the pub sing-along, offered balm for what might otherwise be an intolerable existence. The authorial surrogate here is young Bud, a movie-mad 12-year-old on the verge of sexual awakening; in one bravura sequence, set to Debbie Reynold’s “Tammy,” Davies unforgettably weaves together the three formative spaces of Bud’s youths, and his own: the church, the classroom, and the cinema.
35mm print courtesy of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts Moving Image Archives.
Distributor: Janus Films
The first Muppet movie to appear after the early death of genius Jim Henson, and the most emotionally rich of them all, a revitalizing retelling of Charles Dickens’s classic tale with Michael Caine as a superb Scrooge, Kermit as Bob Cratchit, and a host of fantastic new creations, including the big, bumptious bonhomie-prone Ghost of Christmas Present (“Come in, and know me better, man!”).
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
One fine day Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, discovers a gateway leading to the snow-blanketed, jolly Christmastown, and decides to bring the holiday back to his ghost and ghoul subjects, a plan that quickly goes catastrophic. Producer Tim Burton, who’d first originated the idea for the film long ago in a poem, stamps his unmistakable macabre aesthetic on every frame of this stop-motion cross-holiday family favorite, further enlivened by a passel of warped song standards from composer Danny Elfman.
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Christmas is coming, and at Matuschek’s department store in Budapest—or, rather, a charming, snowbound Hollywood studio evocation of the city in its prewar splendor—the employees are bracing for the holiday rush. But that’s the least of the drama in Lubitsch’s disarmingly emotional romantic comedy, which revolves around the love-hate dynamic between bickering store clerks James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, while also allowing for unusually depthful characterizations of the galaxy of memorable supporting players who bustle around them. Elements of the plot may be familiar from You’ve Got Mail, based on the same 1937 source play, but Lubitsch alone could make this material into something as tender, rueful, and passionate as The Shop Around the Corner.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Judy Garland provides the big, plaintive voice as Dorothy, while companions Tin Man (Jack Haley), Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) are pure knockabout vaudeville fun, in this criminally entertaining musical adaptation from L. Frank Baum’s treasured series of Oz books, which leaps from bleak black-and- white Kansas to ruby slippers-and-yellow brick Technicolor. Why? Because, because, because, because.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
The late, great Kon’s penultimate feature takes place on Christmas Eve, when three homeless Tokyo residents discover, while rummaging through the garbage, an abandoned newborn baby. The ragtag, outcast trio—runaway girl Miyuki, trans woman Hana, and hard-drinking gambler Gin—are united in adopting responsibility for the child, who they care for while searching the city for its parents, following clues contained in a bag left behind with the baby. A rambunctious and heartwarming tale of unlikely allegiances, inspired loosely by 3 Godfathers, John Ford’s 1948 western.
Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment
Long live the new flesh! As Toronto UHF television programmer and softcore smut aficionado James Woods (remarkably convincing playing a scumbag) scents the trail of an intercepted snuff film broadcast, he makes a nasty NSA new friend in the form of Debbie Harry (here launching herself as a screen actress post-Blondie), and stumbles into a mind-control conspiracy that wreaks havoc on both his mind and, seemingly, his very physiology, as he develops an abdominal slot that takes Betamax. “Harry carries herself with the wry, burned-out, but still titillated instincts of a voyager buying a one-way ticket for the outer limits… Harry’s presence grounds [Videodrome] in acute, self-aware reality. A dangerous and damaged one, to be sure, but this woman’s no stranger to the trenches of experience.” —Howard Hampton
Distributor: Universal