Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
Macaulay Culkin’s littlest sadist returns to wreak havoc on the lives of two put-upon criminals in Chris Columbus’s if-it-ain’t-broke 1992 sequel. A shocking lapse in security at the airport sends Kevin from Chicago to snowy New York and his family to sunny Florida. The resourceful kid holes up in the Plaza hotel (complete with a cameo from its then owner, Donald Trump) but bumps into Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern’s Wet Bandits. His uncle’s half-built house is the site for a new, but still exhilarating, series of booby traps involving bricks, nail guns and electricity.
Out now, ITVX
That Christmas
Despite being opened early, this animated present from the pen of Richard Curtis – based on three of his books – is still here to be enjoyed. In a Suffolk coastal town, the community prepare for the season (including a nativity play featuring Mary singing Papa Don’t Preach), until a snowstorm strands the parents away from home on Christmas Eve. How the kids adjust – from making their own version of Christmas dinner to working out who’s been naughty and nice for Santa (a cameo from Brian Cox) – results in an entertaining comic caper.
Out now, Netflix
Triangle of Sadness
The director of Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund, continues to satirise the bourgeoisie in this out-there comedy, which takes aim at the fashion industry via two models, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean). Vain, petty and insecure, the couple go on an Insta-worthy trip on a luxury yacht alongside a group of super-rich types. But they find themselves all at sea after a disastrous storm flips the power dynamic between the guests and the put-upon staff.
Out now, BBC iPlayer
Funny Face
Stanley Donen’s 1957 musical has lovely tunes (by George and Ira Gershwin), fantastic dancing (Fred Astaire, naturally, plus a revelatory Audrey Hepburn) and a picture-postcard view of Paris – but it has attained classic status due to its clothes. As a bookshop assistant turned reluctant model, Hepburn sports a range of stunning Givenchy outfits that lend the drama a high-quality veneer its throwaway May-to-December romantic plot can’t wipe off. And with fashion photographer Richard Avedon as visual consultant – and inspiration for Astaire’s magazine snapper – the film’s entire look is classy.
Out now, BBC iPlayer
The Northman
Essentially Hamlet in Iceland, Robert Eggers’ brooding period epic follows Viking prince Amleth (a never-more-buffed Alexander Skarsgård), whose throne has been usurped by his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang). With his mother Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) subsequently marrying Fjölnir, the stage is set for a gruesome, oedipal tale of ice and fire. Amleth’s quest for revenge takes in berserkers and slavery, murder and mysticism (including a singular cameo from Björk as “the Seeress”) with Anya Taylor-Joy getting in some prep for Furiosa as a formidable Slav he falls for.
Tuesday 17 December, 9pm, Film4
Abigail
This wacky, blood-soaked horror is Agatha Christie by way of Anne Rice, with a devilish soupçon of The Exorcist. A gang of criminals – including Dan Stevens’s ex-cop and Melissa Barrera’s former army medic – hide out in a spooky mansion after kidnapping a rich man’s daughter, Abigail (Alisha Weir), for a mysterious boss. But they have no idea just who she is or what she’s capable of. As heads roll and the house – all dark corners and creaking doors – reveals its secrets, the thrills become increasingly more frantic and more fun.
Tuesday 17 December, 9pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
Fiddler on the Roof
Tradition is both a blessing and a burden in Norman Jewison’s stirring film version of the Bock, Harnick and Stein musical. Set in Tsarist Russia, it follows Jewish milkman and father of five daughters Tevye (a vibrant Topol) as he and his village are forced to adjust to new ideas about faith, love, marriage and the rising levels of antisemitism. With excellent tunes such as If I Were a Rich Man, Matchmaker and Far from the Home I Love, it’s an epic experience imbued with deep sadness.
Thursday 19 December, 1.45pm, BBC Two
Love Actually
After Four Weddings and Notting Hill, writer Richard Curtis decided to expand his romcom remit – and try his hand at directing – with this much-memed 2003 film, featuring at least eight variations on the theme. Its overlapping stories include the British prime minister (Hugh Grant – who else?) and a No 10 staff member (Martine McCutcheon); widower Liam Neeson’s young son and a classmate; and Martin Freeman and Joanna Page as film body doubles. There’s adultery and unrequited love, too, to add tartness to a mostly sweet experience.
Thursday 19 December, 8pm, Sky Cinema Favourites
Elf
Buddy isn’t like the other elves who work for Santa at the North Pole, being an adopted human. But then he’s not like other humans either, which he discovers as he heads to New York to find his real father. A film that never fails to raise a laugh or 10, Jon Favreau’s comedy is steeped in Christmas spirit – but the sublime comic timing and effortless likability of its star Will Ferrell ensure it sidesteps schmaltz. Zooey Deschanel’s department-store worker Jovie is only one of many to fall for Buddy’s naive charms.
Thursday 19 December, 7pm, Sky Showcase
The Six Triple Eight
Tyler Perry’s rousing, revisionist second world war drama tells the true story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion – the only US Women’s Army Corps unit of colour to serve overseas during the conflict. Their job, led by Major Charity Adams (a forthright performance by Kerry Washington), is to sort out 70m pieces of backed-up mail to and from the troops, a poisoned chalice they grasp with weary resolve in the face of racist opposition. A tale of courage and conflict, where the enemy is your own side.
Friday 20 December, Netflix
Citizen Kane
Orson Welles’s 1941 magnum opus is a formally inventive, still relevant exploration into the damaging effects of power, as personified in wealthy playboy newspaper owner Charles Foster Kane. A reporter prepares an obituary for Kane, and the people he interviews offer differing, sometimes contradictory angles on the man and the myth. Similarities with contemporary media mogul William Randolph Hearst were definitely intentional, but the film’s longevity lies in its very human focus on the impossibility of fully knowing another person’s inner life.
Friday 20 December, 11.05am, BBC Two
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Note the change from “v” to “x” in the title – for the fifth film in the Monsterverse franchise, the giant lizard monster is more friend than foe to the big ape and his human handlers. That’s not to say it’s a creature love-in; the duo manage to wreak wanton destruction across many continents and several Unesco world heritage sites, while facing a new threat from an ape species in the Hollow Earth (Kong’s home beneath the planet’s crust) and an ice-breathing Titan. The humans trying to avoid the flying debris include a returning Rebecca Hall as scientist Ilene and Kaylee Hottle as Jia – her deaf adopted daughter, the last survivor of Skull Island and, helpfully, Kong’s best mate. Dan Stevens, seemingly on a path from romantic lead to quirky character actor, provides comic relief as Trapper, a veterinarian with a sideline in simian exoskeletons.
Friday 20 December, Sky Cinema Premiere, 12.35pm, 8pm
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
There’s plenty of snow in David Fincher’s stylish adaptation of the Steig Larsson novel, but the chills are mostly thriller-related. Daniel Craig is Stockholm-based investigative journalist Mikael, hired by Christopher Plummer’s retired industrialist to investigate his own family, and the unsolved death 40 years earlier of his 16-year-old granddaughter. Mikael makes an odd couple with troubled, goth-adjacent young researcher Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) in a detail-heavy but pacy mystery.
Friday 20 December, 9pm, Great! Movies
The Big Lebowski
“The Dude abides.” However, in the Coen brothers’ comic masterpiece, the cardie-wearing, white Russian-supping, bowling-obsessed slacker Jeffrey Lebowski (Jeff Bridges in his greatest role) finds his usual stoner ways disrupted by a mistaken-identity mystery worthy of a Raymond Chandler novel. The convoluted plot is, in truth, neither here nor there but the wealth of weird and wonderful characters – from John Goodman’s volatile Vietnam vet to Julianne Moore’s forceful avant garde artist – and surreal situations make for a highly entertaining experience.
Friday 20 December, 1.20am, Sky Cinema Favourites
ISS
How much you enjoy ISS very much depends on how easily you can switch your brain off from real-world events. This is, after all, a film where a tense international conflict quickly dissolves into all-out nuclear war. Those who find that sort of premise too close to the bone will not thank ISS for the further wrinkle they may not have even thought of: as nuclear war rages on Earth, the Americans on board the International Space Station – including Ariana DeBose’s biologist turned astronaut – are tasked by their government with taking out their Russian colleagues, and vice versa. Low-budget, extremely gripping and probably just a bit too plausible for Christmas.
Saturday 21 December, 10.55am, 6.20pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
Funny Girl
“So she looks a bit off balance /She possesses golden talents.” Bob Merrill’s lyrics are as much a description of the film’s lead, Barbra Streisand, as its subject, Fanny Brice – the Jewish New York performer who became a star with the Ziegfeld Follies in the early 20th century. In William Wyler’s sumptuous 1968 musical, Streisand (in her Oscar-winning film debut) owns the screen, committed to Brice’s comic pratfalls but capable of belting out the big, heartfelt numbers. Omar Sharif makes for an interesting contrast as her beau, suave gambler Nick.
Saturday 21 December, 1pm, BBC Two
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
As much as people’s love for John Hughes’s warm-hearted 1986 comedy centres on Matthew Broderick’s smooth turn as the fourth wall-breaking Ferris, the heart of the film is to found in his best friend, angsty teen Cameron (Alan Ruck). He is taken for a ride, in more ways than one, by Ferris in his father’s vintage Ferrari. The duo and Ferris’s girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) bunk off their Chicago high school for a day of fun in the city, during which Cameron discovers a sense of self-worth, while Ferris remains insouciantly Ferris.
Sunday 22 December, 10pm, E4
Carol
Cate Blanchett is at her velvet-voiced yet brittle best in Todd Haynes’s intense romantic period drama. It’s a 1950s Christmas, and department store worker Therese (the versatile Rooney Mara) is attracted to a customer, the poised, married Carol (Blanchett). But their forbidden affair threatens Carol’s custody arrangement (complete with “morality clause”) with her rich, estranged husband over their daughter. It’s a visually resplendent drama (kudos to clothes designer Sandy Powell) and a heart-breakingly affecting one too.
Sunday 22 December, 1.20am, Film4
Meet Me in St Louis
Like a lot of classic Christmas films, Vincente Minnelli’s musical Meet Me in St Louis isn’t all that Christmassy. Made of a series of seasonal vignettes, it’s as much about summer and Halloween as it is Christmas. However, the movie’s legacy is exclusively festive. This is the film, after all, that gave us the best Christmas song of all time in Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Still, the film is unified by a sweet, gorgeous simplicity that starts with its lead Judy Garland and continues all the way through. An absolute confection of a film.
Monday 23 December, 11.05am, BBC Two
Coco
One of Pixar’s most overlooked movies, Coco finds inspiration in the Mexican Day of the Dead. Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) is a young boy who inadvertently finds himself crossing into the afterlife, where he gets to hang out with all his dead relatives. Bereavement is a theme that runs through all of Pixar’s best work from Up to Soul – even the end of Toy Story 3 – but Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s animated fantasy may be the company’s most vivid exploration so far, complete with a soundtrack that bursts at the seams with joy.
Monday 23 December, 3.15pm, BBC One
The Holiday
The ultimate rebound romcom, Nancy Meyers’ 2006 film is as cosy as the Surrey cottage that Kate Winslet’s journalist Iris lives in. But unrequited love makes it a lonely place, so she swaps homes for the festive period with LA movie trailer-maker Amanda (Cameron Diaz), who has just kicked out her cheating boyfriend. Once in the UK, Amanda’s sadness is assuaged pretty rapidly by Iris’s brother Graham (Jude Law), while Iris has a more perfunctory connection with Jack Black’s composer Miles. With snow, sunshine and stars, it’s custom-made vacation viewing.
Christmas Eve, 11.15am, Channel 5
White Christmas
A film with a fascinating road to screen – Irving Berlin wrote the song White Christmas for the movie Holiday Inn, then several years later decided it was strong enough to have another entire film built round it – White Christmas is a gorgeous VistaVision musical. Narratively, it tends to sag but it’s held in place by a clutch of winning performances from Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney, plus a collection of extremely sturdy songs. Maybe it did deserve its own film after all.
Christmas Eve, 2.15pm, BBC Two
Moana
As commercially all-conquering as this year’s sequel was, the overwhelming feeling of those who went to see Moana 2 was that they should really go back and watch the original. The first Moana, about a Polynesian girl tasked with rescuing a sacred relic, is simply impeccable, fizzing with life and invention and what might be argued as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s strongest ever collection of songs. There’s the Bowie-aping Shiny, the irresistible The Rock-does-Britpop of You’re Welcome and the classic soaring Disney showstopper How Far I’ll Go. This is one of the all-time great animated features.
Christmas Eve, 2.20pm, BBC One
It’s a Wonderful Life
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life has been part of the Christmas canon for so long that it’s easy to forget just how weird it is. If you look past the hugs and team spirit of the climax, at heart this is a film determined to find an innate optimist and batter him to the point of suicide. We’re carried through the darkness by James Stewart’s incredible yearning charisma as the community-minded banker George Bailey, and the promise that no matter how dire things get, there’s always eventually a light at the end of the tunnel.
Christmas Eve, 2.30pm, ITV1
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
If you’re planning to see Christmas in early, this might just be the way to do it. Richard O’Brien’s musical B-movie pastiche is already the stuff of legend. The longest-running film on theatrical release (49 years and counting), The Rocky Horror Picture Show is an orgy of bad taste and catchy songs, with a cast led by Tim Curry, having more fun than anyone else has ever had on camera. The perfect film to watch in your home town, post-pub, on a tiny TV in your parents’ house before the festivities begin.
Christmas Eve, 12.15am, BBC Two
Kung Fu Panda 4
Nobody needed a fourth Kung Fu Panda film, especially not one that came out almost a decade after the third one. And yet, despite not exactly being necessary, this is still an incredibly enjoyable family film. Po (the titular kung fu panda, voiced once again by the adaptable Jack Black) realises that he needs to pick a successor as Dragon Warrior. Then he meets Zhen (Awkwafina), a cunning thief of a fox. Will she have what it takes to assume Po’s mantle? A sequel that benefits greatly from the stylistic risks that DreamWorks has begun to take in recent years.
Christmas Day, 8.55am, 2.25pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
A Quiet Place: Day One
The first Quiet Place (about a family cowering in silence from a swarm of aliens with super hearing) was perfect. The second (about more or less the same thing) was fine. But a Quiet Place origin story? Why bother? Well, a lot of the appeal of Michael Sarnoski’s film has to do with Lupita Nyong’o. Playing a woman whose terminal diagnosis neatly dovetails with the end of the world, she gets to grapple with weighty stuff and absolutely shines. Not an essential film, but a surprisingly good one.
Christmas Day, 12.35pm, 8pm, Paramount+/Sky Cinema Premiere
Scrooge: A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol is such a workhorse of a text you can easily lose count of all the adaptations – animated, live action, comedy, Muppet-based – made over the years. However, for purists, Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1951 film remains the gold standard. Alastair Sim plays a wretched, haunted Ebenezer Scrooge, whose gradual unravelling is played so sincerely it’s almost uncomfortable to watch. As such, this probably isn’t one for kids who have become used to more toothless versions. But if you can hack it, it’s unbeatable.
Christmas Day, 3pm, Talking Pictures TV
The Devil Wears Prada
Is this really something you should be watching on Christmas Day? In all honesty, probably not. The Devil Wears Prada is a film about the suffocating nature of work and abusive professional relationships, and it also serves as a reminder that the glory days of print journalism are far behind us. Is this really the day for that? Well, perhaps. After all, it’s also screamingly funny, beautifully dressed, and the cast – particularly Meryl Streep as the Anna Wintour-like editor – spend the entire duration very visibly having a blast. Fine, just this once you’re forgiven.
Christmas Day, 4.45pm, Film4
North By Northwest
Possibly Alfred Hitchcock’s most spectacular film sees Cary Grant pursued across the US as a result of mistaken identity. The director envisioned it as a zippy palate cleanser after Vertigo, and took every opportunity to use the film as a widescreen tour of New York and Chicago. And yet, he still gave us one of cinema’s all-time great set pieces. If the sight of Grant running for his life from a gun-toting crop duster doesn’t thrill you, it’s only because the moment has been imitated to death.
Christmas Day, 5.05pm, BBC Two
Casablanca
There are two types of people in the world: those who think Casablanca is the greatest film ever made, and those who go out of their way not to think that because they don’t want to be too obvious. Either way, Michael Curtiz’s drama deserves its legendary status. It has a bulletproof script, a set of flawless lead actors in Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains, and – as a film about the second world war that was made during the war, with a message of putting personal desires aside for the greater good – a really nifty piece of propaganda, too. Unbeatable.
Boxing Day, 12.45pm, BBC Two
Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical
What a long journey to screen this film has had. Matilda was first seen in Roald Dahl’s 1988 book, which in turn spawned a lovely 1996 movie before becoming a stage musical by Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly in 2010. That musical was adapted in 2022, and the result may just be the greatest ever depiction of Dahl’s work. Matilda (Alisha Weir) is a sweet young girl who finds herself surrounded by nastiness. Her parents (Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough) are uncaring and aggressive. And in Miss Trunchbull, the furious bulldog of a teacher, Emma Thompson gets to fully transform herself into something monstrous. The fact that director Matthew Warchus was able to pull something faithfully theatrical from all this grubbiness – this is an old-fashioned musical stuffed to the gills with singing and dancing – is an even greater treat.
Boxing Day, 5.40pm, BBC One
Gladiator
With Ridley Scott’s own 2024 sequel fresh in the memory, Gladiator is starting to look more and more like a model of restraint. Does his 2000 film have sharks in it? No. Does anyone fight a rhino? No. Does it have what might be the most pronounced anti-monkey agenda in all of cinema history? Sadly not. But what it does have is Russell Crowe glowering with menace as Maximus Decimus Meridius. And Joaquin Phoenix at his weaselly best as Commodus. And practical fight scenes that still absolutely crunch, a quarter of a century on. The original and best.
Boxing Day, 9pm, BBC Two
Paul McCartney and Wings: One Hand Clapping
Although the Beatles still hog the limelight, there’s a strong argument to say that mid-70s Paul McCartney was the most interesting Paul McCartney. One Hand Clapping – a documentary filmed in 1974 and unreleased for 50 years – is proof of that. It finds McCartney and Wings back on top of the world (Band on the Run was No 1 while it was being filmed) and sees the band tear through their hits, while McCartney casually lobs out a peppering of Beatles tunes.
Boxing Day, 9pm, Sky Arts
West Side Story
Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake was a rare commercial misstep, although that might be because Robert Wise’s 1961 original is still so effortlessly iconic. All the images that come to mind when you think of West Side Story – the colours, the fingerclicks, Rita Moreno’s irrepressible joie de vivre – are from this version. At this point, it should feel like an artefact of a lost time, and yet it’s still so wonderfully alive you have to assume audiences will still be falling in love with it 100 years from now.
Friday 27 December, 1.35pm, BBC Two
King Richard
King Richard has a difficult legacy, in that it’s the film that won Will Smith an Oscar, and therefore the film that made Will Smith go bananas and slap a guy on live television during the ceremony. However, as time goes on, it’s easier to look past all the controversy and see the film for what it is: a smart and happily unvarnished biopic of the father who trained Venus and Serena Williams (played by Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton respectively) to tennis superstardom. And, yes, despite everything, Will Smith probably did deserve to win the Oscar for it after all.
Friday 27 December, 9pm, BBC Two