Perhaps no national holiday is as well-suited to theme-oriented movie-viewing – no one’s at school or work but it’s cold outside, and the day itself has little to recommend it beside being a big build-up to a mountainous meal of poultry and vegetables. Here're our suggestions, respecting the history but suggesting new kinds of family traditions...

King Kong (1933) Growing up a New Yorker in the TV never-never-land of the 1960s and 1970s, Thanksgiving meant one thing: giant apes. For some obscure reason a local broadcast station (back when we had local broadcast stations) would always air, year after year, King Kong, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young from noon to dinnertime. In some households it was the Dallas Cowboys, in others it was the Macy's parade, but in certain homes the day was filled with images of black-&-white hand-animated gorillas rampaging through the respective jungles of Skull Island and midtown Manhattan. The then-brand new Empire State Building instantly acquired a legendary aura for millions worldwide who had never been to New York, while Kong's decimation of the Third Avenue El has become -- in our movie culture's subconscious, at least -- how the famed subway actually disappeared. This counterprogramming was so consistent it became an ersatz annual tradition for everyone we knew. Exactly why those anonymous, old-school TV programmers chose this very narrow subgenre of movies for this particular holiday is a mystery; Plymouth Adventure or Drums Along the Mohawk would've been more logical, if less captivating. But outsized, stop-motion simians? Whatever you say. Somehow today it makes sense, if for no other reason than because Thanksgiving, to kids, is often little more than a big meal. So, on a day that’s dependably gray, cold and somewhat dull, we were treated to grainy Depression-era urban camaraderie, holy-smokes wisecracker Robert Armstrong, foggy island-scapes, vertiginous cliffs (stalked by pterodactyls!), and horrific images of gargantuan chaos – escapism defined, best seen on the living room rug with a good November rain rasping outside. Annual traditions certainly tend to be asinine and arbitrary in America, and there’s no reason this one shouldn’t catch on again. The loud, exhausting 2005 remake might suffice in some households, since it as nearly as long as all three films combined.

Son of Kong (1933) See above. And try to not let that final image haunt your supper.

Heidi (1937) Another TV-scheduling conundrum, but by now an established tradition, for a Shirley Temple film that has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. (Maybe the local networks chose it because it heralded Christmas, with sleigh rides over the snow-covered Alps and Weihnachten in a wealthy Frankfurt home.) But the holiday spirit of appreciating one’s fortune and tenacious family bonds is all over this children’s standby; Temple, a little past her Captain January-cute days, was still a consummate actress and the reigning box office champ of the ‘30s. The orphan-&-grandfather love story is a lock only if you can stand some more sweetness and warmth after the candied yams and pumpkin pie.

Hans Christian Anderson (1952) For decades, this stiff-legged musical about the famed cobbler/fairy-tale spinner also served as local-station Thanksgiving counterprogramming in many states. If you know who Danny Kaye is, it might still fly.

Plymouth Adventure (1952) Hollywood’s only shot at the Mayflower story, and a pleasant mediocrity untempered by Spencer Tracy and Gene Tierney in their rapidly-aging phases, and an Oscar for best special-effects – which are spectacular.

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973) The third of the Melendez-Mendelson Peanuts TV specials, and the first mediocrity (too much Woodstock and Peppermint Patty, too charmless a script), although like the others it may’ve been imprinted upon you as a child like a goose’s southbound flight path, so you may not be able to resist it. All the same, is there a more eloquent portrayal anywhere of an American child’s November afternoons?

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) Woody Allen’s great, intimate comedy-drama about a sprawling, neurotic New York showbiz family, their failures, cross purposes, heartbreaks and hilarious obsessions, all of it spanning two Thanksgiving Day celebrations. And they’re not entirely unlike your Thanksgivings, either – spite, drinking, betrayal, boredom, speeches, chitchat and bustle, wrapped in a family’s unmistakable warmth. The film is segmented into brisk, poetically-titled chapters, scored with a mix of old show tunes and Puccini, and armed with brave performances (Oscar-winning and otherwise) from Allen, Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Weist, Michael Caine, Max Von Sydow, Maureen Sullivan and a sadly semi-Alzheimer-ish Lloyd Nolan. It’s one of those rare, grown-up films – even from Allen – that summons a palpable sense of healing, joy and resilience without for a moment pandering to the audience’s sentimental wishes or surrendering its sometimes harrowing relationship with the real world. You can tell the Woodman was happy in the 1980s – the movie glows with affirmative energy.

Avalon (1990) The third of Barry Levinson’s Baltimore films is also the most ambitious, tracing the arc of a Russian immigrant family from 1914 into the ‘60s, a tumultuous arc punctuated by Thanksgiving dinners – get-togethers that are fraught with generational hostility and growing pains. It’s an ebullient film, but the course of the holiday celebrations allows Levinson to make a strong critical statement about modern life – as the years press on, the family dissipates and fragments, and the ever-present television slowly takes pride of place, instead of conversation and family intimacy. Armin Mueller-Stahl, Aidan Quinn and Elijah Wood constitute the three levels of father and son.

Home for the Holidays (1995) Taken from a bitter New Yorker story, this hostile, lower-middle-class dysfunctional-family comedy can’t be anyone’s idea of a yearly ritual, unless you’re gay and your family isn’t, and unless your folks still live in Baltimore. But give it a shot once, if you’re priming for a trip to the tension-filled homestead – the tasteless wrangling eventually climaxes with a beautiful scene of quiet rue involving lost single mom Holly Hunter, her grumpy father Charles Durning, and a reel of old 8mm family home movie. If this movie seems to you less calibrated outrage and more docudrama, you have our sympathies.

        

Halloween -- the most home-video-ish of all holidays. Selecting the right horror film for end-of-October has become a cultural ritual, and here're just a few of our recommendations:

Haxan, or Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) Benjamin Christiansen’s messy, crazy, thoroughly disreputable, frequently banned Danish silent has been resurrected as a creaky novelty at least three times since it was made – once, in 1968, with a narration read by William S. Burroughs. Hardly a serious work of art or even a visceral genre entry, the movie is nonetheless jam-packed with decaying Gothic imagery the likes of you’ve never seen before, from black masses to possessed nuns to witch burnings to multiple Lucifers ruining the lives of innocents and sacrificing infants. You’ll find no better ambient video for a serious Halloween party.

The Cat and the Canary (1927) The first true trapped-in-a-haunted-mansion-on-a-rainy-night-to-read-the-will movie, and hokey as all get-out, but marvelously musty, too, and pungently Expressionistic-with-a-capitol-E (Germanic master Paul Leni was the director, transplanted to Hollywood, and every architectural inch of the movie is ornately trimmed out). It’s a lovely, nightened place to visit, and inoffensive for kids.

Vampyr (1932) Austere cinema master Carl-Theodor Dreyer – in his first sound film – tried his hand at an outright horror film on assignment, but the end-product cannot be anything the dilettante producers anticipated. Gauzy, somnambulistic, fog-clogged to the point of dislocation, Dreyer’s film is based on a Sheridan Le Fanu story, but is less a tale told than a suffocating dream endured. But Dreyer produces passages that loiter in your skull, particularly the funeral march as seen from inside the coffin. Independently made and badly preserved, the sound is unreliable, and the multi-national cast never seems comfortable with whatever language they’re speaking. All to the better.

The Mascot (1933) Ladislaw Starewicz was a Lithuanian puppet animator whose sketchy career stretches from the pre-Revolutionary days to the Kruschev era, and is roundly acknowledged as the grandfather of stop-motion animation as it has grown to encompass Czech masters Jan Trnka and Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and even Wallace and Gromit. This inventive short – available on several video collections – presages the Toy Story films as well, following the adventures of errant toys lost in a dark city, and climaxing with a windblown, Devil-haunted confrontation that is still chilling.

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) Self-consciously campy about Halloween – buttressed by cartoon-black-cat title cards and lots of faux wind whipping through the studio-Brooklyn trees – this priceless farce remains stagey, and remains a living demonstration of how "staginess" is no handicap at all if the material crackles, and you’ve got Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, Jack Carson and Edward Everett Horton to fill out the single set with their earnest energies. Crazy brownstone aunts who also happen to be serial murderers, Josephine Hull and Jean Adair are the straight men in this scenario, which director Frank Capra keeps whipping along like a relay race. A pungent evocation not only of the usual Hollywood backlot atmospherics, but of the Brooklyn autumn of 1944, when this hilarious trifle was what the old neighborhood badly needed.

The Tingler (1949) Perhaps the most inventive of William Castle’s cheapo postwar horror ditties, this barren, desolate fantasy posits a neurological bug on everyone’s spine that, if you’re scared enough and can’t scream, grows to the size of a loaf of Italian semolina (with rubbery caterpillar legs) and kills you. Few things in mid-century drive-in history compare to the look on Vincent Price's face as he finds the foot-&-a-half, insectoid "tingler" in an autopsied cadaver, wraps his rubber-gloved hands around it, and pulls. Of course, the thing gets out, and even attacks a cinema projectionist, crawling across the white screen – at which point, in 1949, Castle had certain wired seats in the theater buzz and jolt their occupants. Those were the days.

Horror Hotel (1960) A public domain bad dream that has surely lodged in the reptile brain of every kid who ever saw it on local pre-cable TV, this otherwise forgotten British-made horror film was virtually remade as Silent Hill, but the original, however penny-ante and cheesy, still grips, with its shadow-&-cardboard New England setting, a palpable air of neglected-village dread, and a deftly written plot beginning with the Salem witch trials and proceeding to the present. With Christopher Lee in a plummy walk-on, a king’s ransom in dry-ice clouds, and a stirringly heroic denouement.

Carnivals of Souls (1962) Made for peanuts in Kansas (and the Utah salt flats) by a company normally busy with industrial shorts, this ghostly orphan of the ‘60s is one of those movies whose ill-exposed film, stiff acting and general air of gray yesteryear poverty lends it a fantastic chill. A woman in a car gets run off a bridge – but survives, it seems, into an arid Lawrence, Kansas where the heroine (an unforgettable Candace Hilligoss) sometimes goes unseen like a phantom among the populace, and is herself haunted by silent ghouls. It may be a latent-‘50s adaptation of Bierce’s "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," but it’s the dead-air sense of menace and dislocation that makes it stick in your memory like a burr.

Burn, Witch, Burn! (1962) Another British genre toot, this Fritz Leiber-derived witchcraft opus is actually a sharp analysis of marital dysfunction, focusing on a churlish university prof (the rather windy Peter Wyngarde) who discovers his wife of many years (Janet Blair) has long been a practicing sorceress. Pragmatically abolishing the trappings from their life together is his first and last mistake – unbeknownst to him, the wife has been battling rivals and protecting her husband in a secret conjurors’ war.

The Haunting (1963) Of all the reflexive choices for Halloween self-programming found at your local chain videostore, this Shirley Jackson-derived humdinger may come as the biggest surprise to genre fans born since 1970 – this is a true horror film, dread-drenched and blood-chilling and old-dark-house atmospheric like none other. It is not a horror film as Hollywood has defined it over the last quarter century: that is, a decidedly unthreatening litany of F/X, gore, soundtracks blams and glib jokes. In terms of authentic all-hallow’d vibe, this movie is a treasure trove – chilly drafts, gray skies, dark hallways, rooms not to be entered, sounds in the night. This haunted mansion is not cozy, the ghosts do not have problems the plot solves, the heroine is not a plucky teenager. No one gets killed by flying objects; in fact, you don’t see the phantoms at all. But the scenes of supernatural siege are nonetheless the most alarming and scarifying in cinema history. Try it on some "young adults" who think horror movies are just to be giggled at, and watch them get shaken at their roots. Not to be confused with the 1999 remake, which is less frightening than a car alarm.

The Gorgon (1964) Perhaps the flat-out strangest of all of the Hammer Studio horror films of the British ‘60s, utilizing yet again the peerless cheesy old-village vibe, overlit histrionics and garish monster melodrama so familiar from their Dracula and Frankenstein series, but at the heart of it, haunting a backwards hamlet… a figment from Greek mythology, literally, a snake-headed titan whose visage can, and does, turn men to stone. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee stalk about contemplating the absurdities, and the Old World chilliness is fab.

An American Werewolf in London (1981) The preeminent Halloween party film, being a delicious fusion of several key elements: sophomoric irreverence (personified by Griffin Dunne’s masterful turn as a decomposing dead slacker), monster-movie shocks (being pre-digital, all of the transformation scenes are done with make-up, robotics and sweaty actors), and superstitious mood – the misty moors, the cramped inn with secretive locals, the stranger-in-a-strange-land vision of London (and English hospitals). Complete with a soundtrack made up of nothing but songs with "moon" in their titles, John Landis’s movie is enough of a reference point to have invaded real life – there has been for years a very real pub in Manhattan’s West Village called The Slaughtered Lamb, with the film’s very same wolf sign hanging outside, and a dusty cellar where the owners have been known to show the film all day on October 31st.

The Company of Wolves (1984) Another kind of werewolf film altogether – directed by Neil Jordan from the stories of Angela Carter, this dream-like, story-within-a-story fairy tale uses the lycanthrope legend to take on, in all seriousness, the story of Little Red Riding Hood and its overbearing Freudian subtexts. The make-up technology isn’t up to Landis’s movie (or its contemporary, Joe Dante’s Californicated version The Howling), but the trippy Grimm-ness and overt sexual imagery make it a much stranger experience.

The Halloween Tree (1993) Nobody ever sang the song of Halloween as passionately or as lyrically as Ray Bradbury. (A faithful remake of Something Wicked This Way Comes, filmed dreadfully in 1983, is waiting to be made.) This Hanna-Barbera-produced cartoon version of his young-reader novel is torn between a brooding plot (four children chase after the soul of a dying friend) and a rather trite and episodic tour of the holiday’s traditions through the ages, but the man’s rhapsodic sense of the season is unmistakable.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) The real deal, a radical realigning of genre prerogatives, and a lean, mean, pants-soiling machine set in the very real American scrub forest of your forgotten preadolescent nightmares. Forget the astonishing hype, spinoffs and spoofs this movie generated when it was first released – that’s just history now, leaving behind the first movie that genuinely understands fear. It is without a doubt the all-time ideal Halloween renter – it’s the audiovisual equivalent of every sleepover ghost story you ever heard, and it really happened! No, it didn’t, but think about that lucky, traumatized first audience at the Sundance Film Festival who saw the movie at midnight, in the mountains of Utah, without being told it wasn’t a documentary. Daringly, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s film is nothing more than the rough footage shot by a three-student documentary team who have decided to make a cheesy film about a chunk of Maryland woods and its accompanying witch legend. What happens is simple: they can’t get out of the woods, the overnight hike turns into days of hysteria in the wilderness, and something – something – begins to reveal itself to them, in ominous nighttime sounds, pagan signs, and worse. Throughout, the fact that we see only what the beleaguered trio manage to film, and often not even that thanks to the limitations of light and focus in handheld moments of primordial terror, makes this more than just a horror movie – it’s a return to your childhood’s starkest memories of abandonment and dread. Saying The Blair Witch Project is a convincing experience is only scratching the surface – because you believe it, because your vision is limited, because the actors are in reality alone in the dark, because it doesn’t even seem to be a movie but rather somebody’s home footage gone terribly, sickeningly berserk, it might be the scariest movie ever made.

Sleepy Hollow (1999) With this high-octane Gothic comic book, Tim Burton continues his unique, idiosyncratic and very personal career project: to reexperience and revivify the toy chest of pop-culture effluvia that sustained him, and many of us indeed, through our ‘Nam-era childhoods. Burton has said he wanted to homage the old British horror movies made by Hammer Studios, and as usual, he beat them at their own game – no Hammer film ever looked this crepuscular, this grandly, rottenly ghoulish. Extrapolating out Washington Irving’s nervous little ghost story (animated not at all ineffectively by Disney in 1949), the movie dazzles us with one Halloweeny motif after another, from scarecrows with candlelit jack-‘o-lantern heads to enough fog to choke L.A. However thin in the story department (like all of Burton’s films), it’s a fabulous hoot, and you feel the filmmaker’s macabre delight in every frame.

Donnie Darko (2001) Firsttimer Richard Kelly’s film defies description – it’s a wild, unpredictable beast that refuses to be caged by genre or expectations. Enveloped in a mood of cultural doom and psychological unease that is persistently haunting, this saga of teenage alienation is in a more or less constant state of cataclysm – internal or external, you decide. Donnie (the naturally affecting but abstruse Jake Gyllenhaal) is a high schooler in 1988, on the cusp of the Bush/Dukakis elections, attempting to navigate his terrain despite the fact that he sleepwalks, hallucinates, is becoming convinced that the world will end in 28 days, and has decided to stop taking his medication. He’s partnered by a skull-faced rabbit figure inciting him to destruction, and his suburban school is in the grip of a messianic self-help guru (Patrick Swayze), but Donnie’s primary problem is his own flexible reality; he doesn’t know any more than we do exactly how much his mental disturbance reflects and/or causes the cosmic countdown to Halloween. A feverish cult has sprouted around this changeling, and with its sense of ominous portent and middle-class-kid holiday ritual, it may be the best Halloween film ever made, even if it’s not frightening but is instead heartbreaking and mysterious. While the film seems clearly a free-fall study in psychological meltdown, by the end you’re not so sure if it isn’t revisiting An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (again!) or, more aptly, simply culminating in a stunning, purely cinematic act of salvation.

Satan’s Little Helper (2003) Forgotten genre freak Jeff Lieberman – his erratic career began in 1976, as the auteur behind the giant worm saga Squirm – manufactured this 80s-style gore-farce out of crummy horror-flick spare parts, but the upshot is conceptually maniacal and witty. A semi-delusional kid, obsessed with a Satanic video game, meets and obliviously assists a grinning-demon-mask-wearing psycho as he litters bodies through a prototypical suburbia on Halloween – a setup that, at least, allows Lieberman to fill front-lawn graveyard displays with real corpses and bloodied knives. Never released to theaters.

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005) A formal repeat performance of The Nightmare Before Christmas complete with identical character design and Danny Elfman songs, this sumptuous Black Foresty animation virtually oozes with gray, toyshop atmosphere. Of course, it’s strictly for the irreverent Halloween renter, although this endearingly modest movie has some real poetry in it, and a concrete relationship with centuries of Mitteleuropan legend and Ukrainian peasant myth.

Monster House (2006) High-concept digital animation brought down, definitively, to a trick-or-treater’s level. The myth of everyone’s childhood neighborhood – of the darkened, unkempt house on the block no one knows much about, and which may well be the site of unspeakable creepiness, or worse – is exploded out into a carnivorous piece of rotting architecture, swallowing hapless children (or at least their toys) and inspiring endless prepubescent schemes and surveillances. The climactic battle is naturally too long and loud, in the Spielberg mode (he and Robert Zemeckis were producers), but the draughtsmanship is imaginative, the voices (especially Jason Lee and Steve Buscemi) are sharp, and the tunnelvision of kids on a self-scaring tear is splendidly evoked.

                                                
                   

It's still summer! But downward slope of August approaches -- here are a few of Flickipedia's recommendations to help hold onto that firefly vibe and keep it in a jar as long as possible --

Morocco (1930) A Legionnaire (Gary Cooper) dallies with a world-weary desert-oasis diva (Marlene Dietrich), who isn’t exactly as cynical and experience-toughened as she thought. The first, epochal American Marlene Dietrich-Josef von Sternberg film is the muggiest, woozy with hot, moonlit Saharan nighttime. Of course it was all done on the Paramount lot, with shadows – according to von Sternberg’s uproariously self-aggrandizing memoir, the Pasha of Marrakech asked him years later why the filmmaker had not visited him when making the film in Morocco, which he’d recognized first-hand. Von Sternberg maintained he’d never been to the country, and Cooper, in his forward to the book, doubts the windy director could’ve found the nation on a map.

Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et La B te) (1946) Jean Cocteau’s definitive incarnation of the fairy tale, and a supremely dreamy summer daydream, shot with silvery shimmering by Henry Alekan, and infused with nursery wonder. Jean Marais’s leonine Beast is fab, but Josette Day’s serene maiden is close to an ideal.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) Ingmar Bergman, summery? This famous art-house favorite isn’t the Swedish moper’s only comedy, but it is his funniest, largely restricted to intertwining boudoir farce reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and reinvented decades later as Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music), but occasionally embracing love in a haystack at dusk.

The Blob (1958) An alien jelly-mold has invaded Eisenhower-era, drive-in-crazy Middle America, and only honest teen Steve McQueen (who was actually 28) can save us. There’s something quintessential here, a potent feel for small towns at night when everyone’s home looking toward bed except the pesky teenagers – those kids! – and the amused, lazy cops manning the local station.

Black Orpheus (1959) The most evocative tropical film ever made, this peacock of a movie transposes the Orpheus-Eurydice myth to Rio amid Carnivale, and the heavy dose of South American colors, non-stop samba music, sweat, dancing, copulating and Brazilian zest can make you dizzy. The tale is tragic, of course, but one-hit-wonder director Marcel Camus determinedly turns on the juice, and in the end it’s spectacularly life-affirming.

Planet of the Apes (1968) Before there was "the summer blockbuster" (a label on movies now that describes their box-office intentions, not their actual success), there was the matinee movie, meant as a respite from summer heat for pre-video kids with nothing to watch at home and brainpans overflowing with Marvel comics, Aurora models and backyard G.I. Joe scenarios. This beautiful, conceptually fearless piece of all-American pulp – forget the Tim Burton remake – remains resonant and unforgettable, but also invokes an entire decade of summers (what with its frequent sequels and re-releases) for a lucky generation of kids, whose cerebellums are permanently branded with the image of Charlton Heston kneeling on the beach, before the wrecked Statue of Liberty. Ah, to be lost on this desert planet once more...

Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) Director Sergio Leone virtually invented the Italian-made "spaghetti western," and this hot, sweaty mastodon of a movie may be its crowning exemplar: it's the most overwrought, supercool, breathtakingly lavish, preposterously lyrical western ever made. The sets are huge (farmhouses appear to have 12 or more rooms), the story absurd, the music rapturous, the faux-desert sun hot. Every aspect of it is swooning with the love for Movies – every scene is a western standard jacked up into a feverish fit. The incredible opening credits sequence alone (Jack Elam, Woody Strode, a fly, a deserted train station...) is worth the rental fee, and, like the rest of this super-widescreen mock-opera, must have given the video transfer guys serious headaches. The story involves the westward push of the railroad, a mail-order bride (Claudia Cardinale), a rogue outlaw (Jason Robards), a mysterious man-with-no-name bent on avenging his father's murder (Charles Bronson), and Henry Fonda marvelously countercast as the vilest western villain of all time. As exaggerated and berserk and self-conscious as it is, it's also profoundly sad – Ennio Morricone's crescendoing music makes the loss of the Old West seem a heartrending reality.

The Other (1972) Thomas Tryon’s corn-belt-Gothic thriller about a well-off country family in the ‘30s plagued by twin sons (the remarkable Chris and Martin Udvarnoky), one of whom is dead (and a ghost?) and the other of whom may be crazy. A helluva yarn with a nasty taste for Grand Guignol, it’s also an intensely humid film (thanks to director Robert Mulligan), exploring the kid spaces on a summer-scorched farm, before there were Gameboys and day camps.

Chinatown (1974) The film that first reincarnated the detective-film noir, Roman Polanski’s majesterial movie is all about L.A., so it’s not shadowy and expressionistic – it’s blistered by July sunshine, and no less affecting for the turnabout. One of the unarguable gems in the American canon, this film can and should be seen for a variety of reasons, but the glare-&-heat seasonal mood is impressive, particularly in view of how the hero – Jack Nicholson’s supercool private dick Jake Gittes – rather hedonistically spends his sweltering mid-days: hanging out, avoiding authority, kinda like a kid.

Jaws (1975) If you were there, in the theaters in the summer of ‘75, you’ve got this movie in your DNA. Truly communal movie experiences like it haven’t come by since – everyone saw it, twice, and everyone had a new relationship with the beach. But put the man-eating giant monster shark aside for a moment, and you’ve got full-on, real-to-the-touch Atlantic beach community life, back when people listened to transistor radios in the sand and used suntan oil. The actors’ clothes even seem creased with sand and salt air.

1900 (1977) Italian wunderkind Bernardo Bertolucci had a couple of massive hits, globally, with The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, and so he cashed in his cachet to make this, over-5-hour epic. (Some versions are edited down; find the longest you can, and aim for the Italian-language version, although some of the film’s international cast is dubbed in every version.) Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu are an aristocrat and a bastard peasant, respectively, born simultaneously before the turn of the century, and maturing together in Italy through to the rise of Fascism. Politically simplistic (or knowingly nostalgic?), this seemingly limitless pageant is chockablock with masterful set-pieces, scored heartachingly by Ennio Morricone, and its golden Mediterranean aura, consciously reincarnating paintings by Bruegel, Millet and Theodore Rosseau, is something special.

Phantasm (1978) Perhaps the only effective summertime horror film, Dan Coscarelli’s hallucinogenic original deals with a mysterious mortuary with profoundly weird things going on deep inside of it, but investigated by a lonely kid (Michael Baldwin) in the dead of deeply shadowed, suburban July nighttimes. This is what we imagined all of that staying-out-late during summer vacation might’ve amounted to.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) It’s possible that no American movie has been as besotted with the sensual realities of summertime as this overlooked and in fact infinitely repeatable Woody Allen comedy, in which three early-century couples gather in a to-die-for Victorian house in the country for a balmy weekend, and endure various mate-swapping peccadilloes. Light on its feet, soundtracked by Felix Mendelssohn, and blessed with the effervescence of Mary Steenburgen and Julie Hagerty, Allen’s movie goes for broke in terms of seasonal glamour: sunlit meadows, firefly swarms, moonlit brooks, rendezvous in the night forest, dining al fresco, daydreaming in cotton dresses, suspenders and straw hats, all of it shot with Vermeerian sublimity by Gordon Willis. It’s time this honey got a reappraisal.

A Room with a View (1986) When this Merchant-Ivory smash was first released, filmgoers didn't know what hit them: the movie's creation of a thoroughly inhabited, semi-mythic, utterly buoyant Britannic universe was so enthralling even E.M. Forster aficionados were taken aback. The movie stayed in theaters for over a solid year in this country; in England, obsessed audiences saw it every week, a kind of Edwardian Rocky Horror Picture Show. Indeed, it is the most gloriously repeatable of movies, unpredictable, eccentric, large-hearted, rhapsodic and wildly funny. You can easily imagine that more than a few suicides, or at least depression-based behaviors of some regrettable stripe, were prevented in 1986-87, as low-feeling customers returned again and again to balance their lives in favor of essential joy. The movie’s summertime vibe – either in its Florentine chapters, or in the idealized Surrey greenscape – is absolutely infectious. The saga of Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham-Carter) is, archetypally, one of repressed romance, a singsong piece of parlor-room fluff, really. But the movie itself is downright irrepressible, filthy with charming tidbits and background performances and a generous, irreverent tone. The film is paced like a lazy afternoon, and there doesn’t seem to be a limit to its ability to seduce, relax, gladden and captivate. A Room with a View is the kind of film you envy other people for not having yet seen for the first time – although, honestly, the second, fourth and sixteenth times are their own days in the country.

Point Break (1990) One of the few genuine camp romps of the Reagan-Bush era, this goofball, directed in high, silly style by Kathryn Bigelow, has studly fed Keanu Reeves infiltrate Patrick Swayze’s clan of extreme-sports, surfin’-bird, parachutin’ bank robbers. Idiotic and faux-philosophical, it exudes a thrill-seeking vibe that’s hard to skip, especially when it’s apparent that the stars actually jumped out of airplanes.

Belle Epoque (1993) This Spanish hit has a timeworn vacation-movie story – a well-intentioned boob (Gabino Diego) deserting during the Civil War in the ‘30s takes shelter with a family made up of one crotchety old man (Fernando Fernan Gomez) and his four tempestuous daughters (among them, Penelope Cruz and Y Tu Mama Tambien’s Maribel Verdu), all of whom seem in need of a good schtupping. But even though it’s set off-season, it’s still Spain, and it’s got the vibe: Mediterranean heat-beaten stone buildings, Spanish palm trees, beautiful women in sleeveless blouses wandering around thinking about sex even when they don’t think they’re thinking about it. Nothing too artful, but lovely.

Peter Ibbetson (1935) Semi-obscure and precious as a pearl, this woozy mid-Depression projectile is filmed like an old maid’s opium daydream, but the story is what makes your head spin: after being separated as children, Gary Cooper and Ann Harding meet again with a husband between them, and after he’s accidentally killed, Cooper’s unpretentious architect goes to prison for life – but as the couple ages, they literally meet, forever young, in their dreams. For decades. French critic Georges Sadoul wrote about this in his famous 1965 reference volume Dictionnaire du films, saying that "it is difficult to discuss this film without tending to invent certain details more than 25 years after being burnt by its flame." He didn’t invent much in his synopsis, but the flame is very real.

Wuthering Heights (1939) Whatever can be said about Wuthering Heights as a romantic experience fit for Valentine’s Day or any other day to kindle powerful emotions, it can’t possibly be enough. This is it, the seminally cosmic love story of all time, of Cathy and Heathcliff, of a yen so powerful it can transcend the grave and jealousy and fate. Samuel Goldwyn, director William Wyler and screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur worked up a Bronte reduction sauce, story-wise (the movie stops at chapter 16, which is fine, because the next generation never mattered anyway). But the combined natural forces of Merle Oberon (not a skilled actress, but a galvanic movie star), a young Laurence Olivier, the moors (actually Los Angeles County), and Bronte’s fierce storytelling make this a larger-than-life experience. Ignore the few stodgy details, and submerge into its self-destructive passions.

Ninotchka (1939) On the lighter side, this Ernst Lubitsch comedy is a bliss-out, a paean for Parisian mad love-&-fun, pitched by hedonistic American expat Melvyn Douglas to steely, humorless Soviet comrade Greta Garbo, who’s in town on a matter of state business (goofy Russian agents distracted by the Gallic pleasure principle). Of course, Garbo is masterful as the comically grim maiden in a gray suit, barely disguising a warm heart and yearning for love that we can always see beating beneath the Marxist-Leninist ideology. A little champagne, a little Paris skyline, a little woo from the rather satyric Douglas, and she opens like a lily (figuratively speaking, at least; this is 1939). It doesn’t hurt that Lubitsch had the subtlety and timing of a Hollywood Mozart, and Ninotchka’s screenplay, mostly by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, is one of the wittiest and gentlest of the entire Golden Age.

Casablanca (1942) Novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco called it not "a movie," but The Movies, and yet that still doesn’t explain the deathless allure and hypnotic dramatic slam of this greatest Hollywood concoction, as much of a still vibrant myth system as it is a super-romantic wartime soap. Persistently popular for decades after its premiere, Casablanca ran the natural risk of becoming over-familiar, a storehouse of cliches and fabulous dialogue snippets that have, by now, found their way into the language without very many of us knowing where they came from ("I’m shocked, shocked..."). But, today, it rarely has occasion to show up on TV anymore, and Humphrey Bogart is no longer a teen-hip, counter-culture icon. Never mind: it’s still the quintessential mating dance between tough-guy cynicism and hearttugging love fable, between self-satisfaction and self-sacrifice, be it in the context of saving the world from Nazis or limning a love affair, or, as in this film, both. Which means it is not, like so many of today’s romances, strictly a "chick flick" – the sensibility at work here, primarily the voice of a remarkable screenplay written and rewritten a day at a time as the movie was being shot, acknowledges, caters to and converses with both genders. Bogart is virtually the 20^th century’s first definition of a man’s man: ugly and short, but indescribably charismatic and so cool he can run into his lost love (a daydream-inducing Ingrid Bergman), spar with Nazi officers, crack jokes and subtly reveal a lifetime of bitterness and desire, all at exactly the same time. Bergman, for her part, is both intelligent, gentle and fantastically desirable, the despairing hub around which the battle for the free world revolves. That’s what makes it ideal St. Valentine’s Day viewing – no one’s indulging anyone else, and yet everyone is focused on the tragic intercourse of love and history.

Lola (1960) New Wave romantic Jacques Demy takes to the streets of Nantes in his first café love tangle, in which Anouk Aimee is a luscious cabaret singer flitting above a messy but congenial web of lust and love, waiting for her true, idealized love to return to her.

Heaven Can Wait (1979) Warren Beatty’s remake of the pretty-swell Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) is a wonderfully lighthearted love story of an aging quarterback who is plucked up to heaven’s way-station before his time – and before his final Superbowl. Too late to go back among the living as his old self, he gets temporary custody of a millionaire’s body, becoming smitten with an Englishwoman (Julie Christie) in the bargain. Beatty and co-writer/director Buck Henry cut the sweetness with plenty of satire – and watch Charles Grodin’s every duplicitous move. Hardly a moment in the movie that isn’t a pleasure.

Shakespeare in Love (1998) A light-hearted and lovely tale of Shakespeare’s own unrequited love story, which proved the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet (and Twelfth Night), as light on its feet as the play is weighty with tragedy. The comic timing is impeccable, from a large and buoyant cast, and the lovable energy of the movie is embodied in Shakespeare himself (Joseph Fiennes), who never seems to sleep and is in constant athletic motion. The players deliver masses of Shakespearean dialogue, sometimes disguised, with complete conviction, wit and speed, and there’s enough heat between Fiennes and Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow to warm the home fires.

Serendipity (2001) John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale meet during a holiday shopping tug-of-war for a pair of cashmere gloves at Bloomingdale’s and then continue their flirting over the famous frozen hot chocolate at nearby Serendipity III, following up with skating in the snow at Wollman Rink. Is it fate? She thinks so, to an almost psychotic degree, and so decides to test it, and thus the movies carries on through several years and many monstrous dalliances with destiny, before the inevitable hook-up.

Before Sunset (2004) The setting is Paris, the archetypal hub of romance, and we rejoin Celine and Jesse nine years after they left each other at the train station, swearing to meet in Vienna six months later, in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. (Look for that in the "Dating" chapter of Flickipedia.) Clearly, we were supposed to wonder if they’d actually meet up – and, just as clearly, we weren’t supposed to know for sure either way. But this sequel, coming a decade later, with a decade’s wear and tear having accumulated on the actors and the characters, gives us a St. Valentine’s Day-style answer we had no right to expect. It’s both intelligent and sexy and whether you sigh dreamily over the notion of love at first sight or scorn it, the screenplay approaches it in such an original way you won’t have the heart to scoff: Celine and Jesse share humorous, off-beat musings on life while they meander around Paris in the late-afternoon sun the same way they wandered Vienna, but avoiding – and then not being able to avoid – the paths their lives have taken, because, no, they never reunited as they’d promised. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have invested so much in these characters that they share screenplay credit with director Richard Linklater; hard-bitten realists, the three of them are dogged about not letting anyone off the hook romantically-speaking, and yet the movie comes booby-trapped with the sneakiest happy ending ever, a slow dawning as Delpy sashays around her apartment, impersonating Nina Simone. Irresistible.


                         

It’s too cold to go outside, isn’t it? If you lean toward counteracting the months of frost with a blast of tropicalia, see the "Summer" section of FLICKIPEDIA. But we’ve found that if you’re hunkered down in the warmth of your home, all the better to punctuate the extreme weather outside, from a comfortable distance, of course. Here're just a few of our Christmas-to-February recommendations:

South (1919) Forget the recent movies, IMAX and otherwise, that recreate the doomed Shackleton Endurance expedition of 1914-16 to the South Pole; this astonishing film was shot on the spot by one Frank Hurley, who stood there stranded on the ice with the rest of the crew, watching the ice shelves crush the ship, not knowing whether he was in fact doomed or not, and yet still filming, beautifully. All other movies about polar survival are pretenders by comparison.

The Chechahcos (1924) Amateur Alaskan filmmaker Lewis S. Moomaw’s silent film is an extraordinary Klondike melodrama shot in the northern wilderness and featuring stunning on-location glacier footage. The story is antique, but there’s no denying the veracity of the on-location action. Available on a DVD set titled Treasures from American Film Archives: 50 Preserved Films.

SOS Iceberg (1933) This early sound epic is a prime example of the 1920s-30s specie of German adventure film known as "the mountain film," invented and primarily directed by one Dr. Arnold Fanck, and starring primarily one Leni Riefenstahl, just a few years away from being the Third Reich’s most famous propaganda filmmaker. The key attraction is the copious amount of location footage – when Riefenstahl and her comrades are scouring the Arctic circle for lost comrades, it’s no studio set. Of course, man’s triumph over nature’s adversities is just one shading of the ubermensch obsession that fired the Nazis. Other terrific examples available on disc are The White Hell of Piz Palu (1929) and Storm Over Mont Blanc (1930).

Portrait of Jennie (1948) After Gone with the Wind, producer David O. Selznick’s career project was largely taken over with erecting large, crazy movie-poems in honor of his beloved wife Jennifer Jones, and this unashamedly naive phantasia might be the most lovesick. Joseph Cotten plays a struggling artist in a New York where it’s nearly always snowing, and Jones is a girl that appears to him – and only to him – with a ghostly backstory of her own, inspiring him with her inner light.

Doctor Zhivago (1965) Boris Pasternak’s Russian-revolution love story, done up in ‘60s-epic style by grandmaster David Lean, about a good-hearted doctor-poet (Omar Sharif) swept up in a political storm he cares nothing about. In fact, he’s passive about pretty much everything, including his torn love for both his gentle, devoted wife and legendary beauty Lara (Julie Christie). This is Russia, so the springtimes feel like winters in Minnesota, even if this was shot almost entirely in Spain (!), and the subarctic ambience is completely fabricated out of white wax. Fake or not, the swirling flurries are relentless, and there are moments where you feel like you’re watching the story unfold from inside a snow globe. Doctor Zhivago is over-wrought and visually constipated (so much massive history, so many small rooms), but the Zhivago-Lara-stranded-in-the-ice-house set-piece has a cozy-wintry chill that’s hard to beat.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) This moody, fur-bundled frontier odyssey might be the best Robert Altman film of all. Warren Beatty plays a entrepreneurial rogue who sets up business in a muddy northwestern mining town (it looks, no kidding, as if it were shot in 1830), and eventually teams up with an opium-smoking madam (Julie Christie) looking to set up a whorehouse. Trouble sets in when gangsters try to squeeze the pair out, and resort to authentic prairie ethics to get their way. This movie teems with life like beehive; nobody was better than Altman in filling movies up with believable inhabitants and texture, and here the misty, greasy, snowy reality of range life is evoked like nobody’s business. No chicanery here – this was how Rocky Mountain life (shot in Vancouver) without utilities were like. Even the relentless Leonard Cohen songs begin to get under your skin. The movie is also a dead-lift triumph of the American New Wave – those years between 1966 and 1977 in which Hollywood went out of its way to make gritty, truthful, challenging films you could believe in.

Promised Land (1988) Michael Hoffman’s neglected, "personal" drama tracks the post-school lives of two Utah kids: Keifer Sutherland’s shy, geeky damaged goods, and Jason Gedrick’s basketball star-turned-local sheriff. Meg Ryan co-stars, launching her fledgling career with her portrait of a bipolar nightmare very far from the upturned-nose sweetheart she became famous for. The landscape is frozen, and the characters are lost.

Edward Scissorhands (1990) They have winter in Florida, too, and this lovely, melancholy Tim Burton fantasy is for the Southern-most snow-deprived of Americans. Anyone who’s had rolls of cotton wadding stapled to their hot roof as fake snow will treasure this eagle-eyed film for its satiric take on postwar suburban chintz, but in the end there’s snow after all – born of misfit heartbreak and devotion.

Archangel (1991) A genuine whatzit, this second feature by hermetic Canadian avant-gardist Guy Maddin comes in the guise of a scratched, faded, forgotten movie circa 1930, set in the eponymous Soviet city after WWI, but quite obviously shot on cardboard sets and more believably taking place in Maddin’s movie-crazed headbone. The cheapjack surrealisms and crazy non sequiturs are the joke, covered in fake snow and subject to the harshest winds fans can produce.

Fargo (1996) A poker-faced slalom through the icy fields of true-crime docudrama, Joel & Ethan Coen's cascade of frozen Minnesotan cops and crime is probably the loopiest based-on-fact murder drama ever made, something like In Cold Blood reimagined by Dave Barry. Somehow, the filmmakers tell the snowbound saga of a tumbling-dominoes 1987 permafrost bloodbath – featuring nerve-frayed scam source William H. Macy, wired hired gun Steve Buscemi, and serene pregnant policewoman Francis MacDormand (an Oscar) – as cold realism and yet retain their trademark absurdism and larky rhythms. Having grown up in a Minneapolis suburb, the Coens know the vernacular inside and out; though it often feels like a snarky plummet down a long flight of stairs, the movie ends up being a celebration of quiet banality. By the time we reach the woodchipper, we're as thankful as MacDormand’s Chief Marge that there's a mittened world full of idiotic pleasantries and all-you-can-eat restaurants to go back to.

The Ice Storm (1997) At its heart, this Ang Lee adaptation of the Rick Moody novel is a humane, sane, hilarious and rich-as-mousse dispatch on the woes, risks and costs of the all-American family, climaxing in the very real 1973 winter storm of the title and its largely symbolic fallout. The multiple character study encompasses an affable Dad (Kevin Kline) equally bewildered by his affair with a trendy neighbor (Sigourney Weaver) and his slowly disintegrating family, a haunted Mom (Joan Allen) lost somewhere between girlhood and disillusionment, a rebellious daughter (Christina Ricci) experimenting with shoplifting and mock sex with the neighbor’s boys (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd), and a sweet-natured pothead son (Tobey Maguire) impassively grappling with puberty. But the real subject is vain, media-drunk modernity itself, and how it leaves us unprepared for the worst things in life, things that can happen at night when everything’s frozen over.

Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (2001) The first film shot in Inuktitut, this 2 1/2-hour epic about Inuit love, family and betrayal is all Arctic, all the time, shot with a wholly convincing native cast on digital video. Primal, enthralling and very cold.

                  

    "The mother of all holidays," is how Jean Shepherd put it in his narration of A Christmas Story, and true enough – but Christmas is also the year’s most demanding day (or fortnight, really) in terms of atmosphere, emotional temperature and point of view. We don’t feel a need to get all colonial or even terribly grateful on Thanksgiving; nobody talks about "getting into the spirit" of Mother’s Day, Veterans Day or even Independence Day. But for Christmas, there is a pervasive compulsion to summon reserves of tolerance, generosity, congeniality and child-like upbeat-ness, and we go to extraordinary cultural lengths to make it happen. Hence, the phenomenon known as the Christmas movie, all of which serve as narrative windows into that edenic space where cold hearts are warmed, charitable love dawns on the greedy, and, most of all, the childhood memories and the purest notions of home become easier to grasp and hold. Old movies – closer to the idealized past from which all adult ardor for the holiday flows – are best; crassly commercial contemporary parables about crass commercialism (Jingle All the Way, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Christmas with the Kranks, et al.) are not, and we’ve largely left them behind. The season is short, after all. Here, we've left out the reflexive favorites everyone knows, though rest assured we vet them in Flickipedia.

The Night Before Christmas (1905) This fabulously arthritic Edison production from the infancy of film history – directed by narrative pioneer Edwin S. Porter – is a dusty dream of Victorian faerie-ism, opening with Santa feeding a herd of real reindeer and teeming with antiquey landscape paintings and pre-tech toys. It’s also the climactic short on Kino’s DVD A Christmas Past, a collection of silent, "vintage holiday films" that includes D.W. Griffith’s fiercely moralistic A Trap for Santa (1909), the utterly lovely Edison film of realistic snowfall frolicking A Winter Straw Ride (1906), and Santa Claus (1925), an amateur film proudly shot on and around the Alaskan glaciers. A hypnotic time capsule and an effective pre-modern weapon in the war against shopping and accumulation for their own sakes.

Scrooge (1935) It’s a tiring parable, but Charles Dickens’s chestnut A Christmas Carol is all but unavoidable. Preachy, sure, but it’s such an overused story that you can hardly watch an hour of November television without being pelted by a commercial’s reference to it. Better to go to the source – reading! – or this first sound version, British-made, starring stage vet Sir Seymour Hicks as Scrooge. A creaky, attic-webby beaut, choked with shadow and fog.

Remember the Night (1940) An overlooked screwball masterpiece from Hollywood’s Golden Age, written by bad-boy satiric genius Preston Sturges and directed by premier woman’s director Mitchell Leisen, in which whimsical bachelor-DA Fred MacMurray takes sexy shoplifting tramp Barbara Stanwyck with him to his homestead for Christmas. Sturges’s dialogue, volleyed by these pros four years before Double Indemnity, is mint, but the idiosyncratic comedy slowly, organically seeps into melancholy. The film is as smart-mouthed as it is stunningly compassionate, and Sturges’s fat heart comes through in ways that are unique in a Christmas film. The characters’ feet are planted in the real world, and the season’s triumph is rescue from the memory of a poisoned childhood.

Beyond Tomorrow (1940) An fiercely odd septuagenarian Christmas tale from the authoress of Love Affair, this forgotten dilly concerns three bachelor fogeys (buoyant Charles Winninger, crusty/affable C. Aubrey Smith, dyspeptic Harry Carey) who die and return as ghosts to facilitate the seemingly doomed romance of young ‘uns. The character-actor star-power alone makes it worth seeking out, but the story is a fabulous lark. Sometimes retitled Beyond Christmas.

Holiday Inn (1942) Possibly the best movie to watch while wrapping presents. Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are a pair of showman who decide to open a country inn that celebrates every holiday with song and dance. That’s it for story. As you’d expect, most of the film is caught up with other seasonal occasions; Christmas is just one page on the calendar. It just so happens that the movie’s endearingly canned studio winter and Irving Berlin’s "White Christmas" are the most memorable things about it. That’s fine: you’re looking for tape. Anyway, from today’s perspective, there’s something inherently Christmasy about the hat-wearing, crooner-loving, homefront ‘40s, isn’t there?

The Holly and the Ivy (1952) A cozy, mature and rarely-seen British heartwarmer in which an aging parson and widower (Ralph Richardson) convenes with his three adult children and other relatives on their cozy village homestead for the holidays - to reminisce about the war, remember dead loved ones, and to lay bare a few family secrets. Director George More O’Ferrall is no Frank Capra, but there’s a lot of genuine warmth to go around.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) Baby-boomers know this puppet-animated fable’s scary oddnesses inside and out: the Burl Ives snowman in a plaid vest, the icy toy mansion in the snow, the feverish anxiety about reindeer employment, the Island of Misfit Toys’ winged lion-king, the too-chilling Abominable, complete with giant shark teeth and autonomously mobile fur. Forgive us if we think this decades-old kid’s fodder more than a little strange, from the song lyrics ("We all pretend the rainbow has an end," the key ballad says, "and you’ll be there my friend someday...") to the ending credits, when a sleigh-riding elf, distributing umbrellas to the toys and then tossing them overboard, figures a toy bird can do without and drops him, not knowing it’s a Misfit Toy alum and cannot fly. But that is all decidedly beside the point; for most intents and purposes, because we grew up with it being broadcast every year, it’s an annual must-see. Of course, the Rankin/Bass animation mill rapped out other seasonal staples, all to some degree essential: The Little Drummer Boy (1968), Frosty the Snowman (1969), Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974), and others far less memorable. But Rudolph is the genre’s greatest head-trip, a weird dream within which we all remain bewildered children.

Comfort and Joy (1984) Scottish director Bill Forsyth is – or perhaps was, since his only film since 1993 was never released in the U.S. – a master of gentle discombobulation, and his Christmas movie is appropriately wacky, but in a quiet, generous way. The holiday here is experienced by a middle-aged Glasgow radio personality (Bill Paterson), whose sexy kleptomanic girlfriend walks out on a mysterious whim, and whose subsequent Christmastime loneliness is abated only by his involvement in a turf war fought between two rival ice cream vendors. With Forsyth it’s all in the details and rhythms, and the movie has a thoughtful, ruminative personality that could do wonders, as the titled implies, for the sad-sacked and lonesome.

Gremlins (1984) A nasty, fantastically clever antidote-film for those of us who think that Christmas commercialism has gotten completely out of hand. Here, seemingly innocent Christmas presents have a Hyde side, take on carnivorous lives of their own and hunt down their recipients. The mayhem of Joe Dante’s badtime-dream – in which adorable Muppet-ish furball creatures, once introduced into suburbia as gifted pets, transform into raving homunculi – might be the most astute metaphor for holiday capitalism ever devised; what seems at first an ordinary act of giving becomes a bloodthirsty battle to the death. (Is there a more triumphant moment in all of ‘80s Hollywood than the hero’s mom, faced with a kitchen full of malevolent harpies, gearing into combat mode and dispatching the cackling creatures in the blender and the microwave?) Should we all have to fight our gifts? We’d certainly give the exchange, and the intent behind it, a lot more thought.

The Dead (1987) Director John Huston may have been close to dying, but apparently no one else was going to film James Joyce’s most famous short story, and make it an indelibly mournful, Old-World Christmas experience. Two spinster aunts host a Christmas dinner in turn-of-the-century Dublin, when ladies wore long skirts and high lace collars and guests entertained each other with stories, songs and dancing. Outside, horse-drawn carriages glide gently through the snow; inside, the holiday feast is an occasion to discuss scandals and politics before setting aflame the Christmas pudding. That is, before a plaintive singing of a sad Irish ballad, and suddenly the past returns and the present begins to decay and the season’s marking of time and age inspires a deep and universal melancholy. Something of a family affair (Huston’s son Tony wrote the ingeniously expanded screenplay, and daughter Angelica stars as the wife with a secret story), this dreamy adaptation refuses to be hurried, and Joyce’s prose (narrated by Donal McCann, as the husband) is surpassingly eloquent. With logs for the fire and a toast in hand, it’s a salve for those hungering for a more literate, and subtly powerful, holiday film.

Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1987) It may be one of America’s best kept secrets: we don’t really like the ballet of The Nutcracker very much, and resent having to ingest it every year as if it were a citizenship requirement. Most of us would be surprised to learn that the original E.T.A. Hoffmann tale has precious little to do with sugar-plum fairies and all to do with a rather vicious war between toys and monster mice. Filming ballets has always been a bad move in any event, but this Carroll Ballard film version has a few saving graces, beyond the score: it’s designed by Maurice Sendak, and it has a bewitching opening act, in which the Drosselmeier figure embarks on his epic toymaking, shot in intricate close-up. Then there’s dancing.

Elf (2003) Christmas sappiness plus flatout contemporary yucks, with Will Ferrell making himself a bankable star as a human-raised-as-North-pole-elf who gets detoured, in Miracle on 34^th Street-slash-Big fashion, to the new New York – which isn’t all that different from the old New York of our Christmas movie memories, down to Ferrell’s employment at Gimbel’s (shot, it seems, in the survivor of the department store giants, Macy’s). An unexpected surprise is Zooey Deschanel crooning "Baby, It’s Cold Outside" in a voice rich enough to rival the original Esther Williams version. 

                             

Zero de Conduite (1933) As much as this Jean Vigo mini-masterpiece may be helpful in terms of "Parenting Tweens & Teens," it’s also a vivid snapshot of grade-school rebelliousness – you may’ve forgotten what it was like to spitball a teacher in 5^th grade, or what it felt like to want to, but this visionary little gem jacks you into that universal spirit in no time flat, and at the same acts out your craziest preadolescent wishes of ridiculous chaos.

The Curse of the Cat People (1944) One of the quiet miracles of ‘40s B-moviemaking, this is a dream-like journey into an eight-year-old girl’s fantasy world, as the daughter of Kent Smith, the hero from Cat People now remarried, is visited by the ghost of his first wife (Simone Simon). Shadowy, gentle, and captivating.

The 400 Blows (1958) This semi-autobiographical French New Wave landmark by Francois Truffaut is as potent a vehicle for an adult’s autobiographical ruminations as it is a guide to the new adolescent’s storming terrain. Watch Jean-Pierre Leaud as he watches grown-ups, steals happiness in their absence, and warily regards the world that grates against him at every turn.

If... (1969) British critic-turned director Lindsay Anderson made his mark with this boarding-school diatribe, which remade Zero de Conduite down to the rooftop climax, but in the process cut the English disciplinarian education system to ribbons. It was, also, a generational anthem-film, ill-mannered and furious, and it made Malcolm McDowell enough of a key figure to make him Stanley Kubrick’s inevitable casting choice the next year for A Clockwork Orange.
 
Small Change (1976) Truffaut returns to early adolescence, in a tapestry film depicting an array of suburban French children, overcoming ordinary adversities and embracing life’s simple glories in ways that are alien to grown-ups. Invigorating and hope-generating.

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) If you don’t remember the killing fields of the seventh grade, this movie’s a reminder, opening in the Theater of Cruelty of the junior high school cafeteria, where finding somewhere to sit and someone who will let you sit with them has all the shivery dread of being lost in a police state without ID. The camera slowly circles around the 11-year-old Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo), standing there holding her tray and surveying the combat zone, her bespectacled face a knot of huddled horror. You’ve been there.


            

School's out, 4-eva, high school, middle school or college -- here're some rentable recommendations from Flickipedia, capturing or recapturing that tingliest of seasons...

The Graduate (1967) A generational emblem more than a movie, this Mike Nichols classic is about lostness, anomie and social incompleteness as only movies made in the late-60s-early-70s can be. Dustin Hoffman became a star in the unlikeliest of circumstances: as an aimless college grad who cannot get a fix on what he wants out of life. He is seduced by a family friend (Anne Bancroft), and is then pressured into dating her daughter (Katherine Ross); as life gets more complicated, he searches madly for any reason at all to choose one destiny over another. Credit is due to 1967 audiences, who saw themselves in this ambivalent portrait, and dared to ask big questions of themselves and their movies. Picture, if you can, the new millennium’s freshly graduated degree-holders with the same choice.

American Graffiti (1973) The first coming-of-age ensemble comedy in American movies? George Lucas’s sublime evocation of a midwestern 1962 of cars, rock ‘n roll radio and lost sub-adults certainly established the timeless stereotypes of that post-graduation summer night that everyone experiences: the high school sweethearts confronting college and separation (Ron Howard and Cindy Williams), the itchy smart kid who doesn’t know if college is what he wants (Richard Dreyfuss), the hopeless dweeb looking only to score (Charles Martin Smith), the cool dropout hood who cannot adjust to the real world (Paul LeMat). Roaringly funny and bittersweet.

Fandango (1985) A narrow but rueful valentine to the college grads of the ‘Nam era, introducing the world to Kevin Costner, as the larky leader of a motley gang of sullen jerks either embracing the war, running from the draft, getting married or merely remaining drunkenly unconscious. Costner’s energy keeps it afloat.

Dazed and Confused (1993) This is what the beginning of summer, with school a fading memory already a day later, felt like for director Richard Linklater, whose milieu here was Texas in the late ‘70s. Trailing after a dozen or more recently freed high schoolers as they search for a party, contemplate their dubious role in the social order, and inflict/escape from the hazing rituals that may be particular to Austin suburb schools, the film is dense with detail, one-liners, deft performances and astutely observed reality – though it may take two viewings to mesh with the movie’s unique rhythms. It’s also something of The Outsiders of its generation, more or less introducing the world to Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Nicky Katt, Rory Cochrane, Joey Lauren Adams, Parker Posey, etc.

Kicking and Screaming (1995) Here was the late-century’s generational anthem film, except no one seemed terribly interested in identifying with it. Writer/director Noah Baumbach’s debut, the movie is a rueful portrait of four preppy, Ivy League-ish friends living off-campus, suddenly left in the weird afterworld where graduation has marked them as grown-ups but the indulgent, trivia-obsessed allure of college life maintains its grip. Baumbach poured a hundred college careers’ worth of ironic humor into the script, and Chris Eigemann, Josh Hamilton and Carlos Jacott are a dry riot. Eric Stoltz almost steals the movie in an improvised role as a philosophical bartender, but it’s hard not to fall for Olivia d’Abo as an impulsive creative-writing major conscious of her braces.

Can’t Hardly Wait (1998) An overlooked gem among a hundred cretinous teen-party comedies, in which another dozen or so easily recognizable high school types flounder their way through a single night of epiphany, melodrama, humiliation, socialization, and beer. The film’s pulsing, forgiving heart and sharp ear (courtesy of writer/director team Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont) are responsible for the movie’s distinction; the joyous chaos of teenage parties are not easy to depict, but this movie gets it, with a title from an old Replacements song no less. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Ethan Embry are the mismatched hottie-&-nerd, but funnier and more believable are Lauren Ambrose’s quasi-goth cynic, Peter Facinelli’s monster jock, and Charlie Korsmo’s ultra-geek.

Ghost World (2001) The pioneering film portrait of a distinctive, universal and heretofore ignored teenage social class: the bitter, frumpy, snobbish, willfully unpopular "weirdos," self-defined only in disdainful opposition to their peers. It’s a state that often provides for a certain amount of lostness after graduation, which is what the heroines of Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel and Terry Zwigoff’s acerbic movie struggle with: the vacuum left once they’re left to their own devices. Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson are pitch-perfect in what amounts to an act of modern anthropology – rescuing a lovable misfit teen type from obscurity.

Independence Day approacheth -- parades and fireworks and barbecues – but what if it rains? And what about the evening of the 3^rd? You can’t count on the movies for accurate history, but they can contextualize the party.

Janice Meredith (1924) A pulpy silent romance in the D.W. Griffith tradition that positions its heroine, played by Hearst protege Marion Davies, as helping out with both Paul Revere’s ride and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. Extremely rare, with a sensational cast that also included W.C. Fields (as a drunken Brit officer), Tyrone Power Sr. (as Lord Cornwallis), Fatty’s cousin Macklyn Arbuckle (as Davies’ father), and, as Marie Antoinette, one Princess Marie de Bourbon, a popular model and sole living relative of King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy, in one of only two known film appearances.

Ah, Wilderness! (1935) Small-town, turn-of-the-century life by way of Eugene O’Neill, so depression, alcoholism and prejudice cuts the sun-dappled optimism to some degree. But it’s set on and around a 19^th-century-style, midwestern 4^th of July celebration, and the exuberant, creaky, cracker-barrel priorities are in line, with Mickey Rooney and his little-rascal buddies setting off firecrackers underneath the grown-ups’ various melodramas.

Lafayette (1961) A little-seen French historical pageant about the revolutionary hero, good for old-fashioned European attention to period sumptuousness, as well as a spot-the-star cast of internationals, including Orson Welles as Benjamin Franklin, Jack Hawkins as Cornwallis, vet character star Howard St. John as George Washington, and Vittorio de Sica as Edward Bancroft, Franklin’s double agent.

1776 (1972) Easily the most thorough-going War of Independence film ever made in Hollywood – there aren’t many competitors – this silly anachronism is also a eager-to-please Broadway musical put on film, which says something about how truly interested Americans have been about their own history. Still, it has its devotees, and besides, the facts are there, a good deal of the dialogue is attributed quotes, the cast is game, and the anti-conservative number "Cool, Cool Considerate Men" is now included on video versions, after being initially cut by studio chief Jack Warner at the behest of President Richard Nixon.

Blow Out (1981) Brian De Palma’s tribute to Antonioni’s Blow Up, Chappaquiddick, Watergate, JFK, sound engineering and Philadelphia, all rolled into a crazy political-assassination plot that the hero (John Travolta, engagingly relaxed) may or may not have accidentally recorded on audio tape. The background of a berserk City of Brotherly Love during the July 4^th fete is as central, visually and ironically, as Hitchcock’s use of national monuments. All in all, a smashing, thoughtful, stirring piece of pulp, and probably the best movie for the holiday.

Revolution (1985) A rare attempt by the Hollywood studios to make a serious film about the Revolution, but boy, the engine dropped out of this lemon straight from the factory. Which makes it something like a comedy now, what with Al Pacino’s meant-to-be-historical Brooklyn accent, Annie Lennox stalking around as "Liberty Woman," a sound mix that literally loses 50% of the mumbling dialogue, a stupefying lack of history or action, and an impressive visual pallette that runs from umber to sienna.

The Last of the Mohicans (1992) Though Michael Mann’s buckskin-sex, tomahawk-to-the-head take on James Fenimore Cooper isn’t about the Revolutionary War or national independence, it evokes as few films do the real wilderness of the time, as both homestead, battlefield and frontier. Log cabins, cannon-stocked forts, gunsmoke and mud, eating venison by real candlelight – this may be the closest an American film will ever come to capturing the period. Plus it has Daniel Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe as star-crossed lovers amidst the warfare, making the most convincingly hot movie pair of the ‘90s.

                                                        

Is it that time, time for weddings?! You've got months and months of preparation, and yet do you have any idea what you're in for? Moviemakers heart this familiar social rite like no one's business, and the movies could be ceremony-jitter foot-rubs, fair warning shots across your bow, etc., but remember, they're someone else's story, not yours.

The Philadelphia Story (1940) A famous pre-nup crash-and-burn: Katherine Hepburn is the proud, self-righteous bride-to-be wanting to be knocked down from her pedestal ("I don’t want to be worshiped, I just want to be loved."); Cary Grant is the sarcastic ex determined to make her feel guilty and stop the wedding; Jimmy Stewart the class-conscious society reporter thrust into the maelstrom. General wedding planning tizziness abounds. The comedy is high, and this stable of racehorses all run in peak form – even if the thrust seems to be that women should forgive men their boyish faults, whether drinking, adultery, or just the pinching fingers of the slightly creepy Uncle Willie (Roland Young). Though overrated, this may be a good movie to watch upon engagement if only because it stirs up every doubt and second thought you should have before tying the knot.

The Forgotten Man (1941) (on DVD Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin) The old jokes about the bride’s father, milked dry and ignored and sidelined throughout the protracted wedding-preparation process, began here with this vintage Robert Benchley short. No one did or has ever done befuddled paternalism as well as Benchley.

Father of the Bride (1950) The grandad of all Hollywood wedding comedies, this story begins at the end: an exhausted father in the aftermath of his only daughter’s wedding, sitting among the wreckage of his home, rubbing his aching tootsies. If you’re contemplating a simple home wedding, this movie will give you pause – there’s nothing simple about it and you’ll be left cleaning up after the newlyweds have hopped their plane to Bermuda. Spencer Tracy at his comical best as the ineffectual dad will make you glad if you’re the father of the groom, who seems to get a free ride. Then again, the costs Tracy incurs will seem free by comparison with today’s price tag: $3.75 a head! If only.

Cousin, Cousine (1975) Bubbly French rom-com: two cousins-by-new-marriage, already unhappily wed to sluts, link up and have an affair, which causes problems in subsequent family gatherings. Sexy and light, with Marie-Christine Barrault holding it together with the easiness of her smile and the lilt in her voice.

Moonstruck (1987) Romance and Italianate comedy in a kind of dreamy, magical hunk of brownstone Brooklyn, with Cher’s widowed frump dubiously accepting the proposal of Danny Aiello’s dumb momma’s boy and then falling for his troubled, one-handed brother (Nicolas Cage). Luckily, the margins of the movie are filled to the brim with witty character actors, slabs of comedic nonsense, behavioral detail, and a sense of warm-heartedness toward the follies of humankind. Here, John Patrick Shanley captured a cartoon-paisan flavor, and though it dates, it’s a far better submersion in Mediterranean-emigre boisterousness than My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

True Love (1989) Nuptial planning, Bronx Italian style, including tacky bridesmaid gowns (rainbow), tawdry wedding halls that serve mashed potatoes dyed to match the color of the gowns, opinionated friends, interfering relatives, and a bride and groom who are swept along with the idea of marriage as something you ought to do and so convince themselves that they want to do it. Ron Eldard’s groom is hopelessly immature and unromantic but Annabella Sciorra ignores the fact that her marriage is doomed before it starts; she can’t help it, she’s too busy wiping fingerprints off her back. This is probably a lot funnier if you’ve witnessed this Noo Yawk behavior up close; otherwise, it may all just seem completely crazy.

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) A band of single friends, led by the shyly charming Hugh Grant, chase each other around England, attending weddings in various states of disarray and embarrassment. Star-crossed amour and funny wedding mishaps abound but this international smash sucked in its audience and an Oscar nomination with the grace of its execution – a brilliantly witty screenplay, perfectly staged and acted, and a pervasive fondness for even the bit characters and background extras.

Walking and Talking (1996) Nicole Holofcener’s chick flick depends absolutely and generously on the verve and candor of Catherine Keener and Anne Heche as lifelong buddies negotiating their own mutating friendship as one faces marriage and the other faces loneliness. The film has the easy rhythm of a three-hour girl talk phone call, and all the actors run like linebackers with their unpredictable and witty (but not too witty) characters. Keener is particularly radiant and raw, in a way that justifies the whole movie – a dozen things can happen on her face at once. Watching her come up with something to say in an embarrassing situation is like watching a Japanese table-tennis pro play himself.

Black Cat, White Cat (1998) Anyone familiar with the films of Sarajevo-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica knows what they’re in for with this unrestrained absurdism, about a Rom enclave on the banks of the Danube, a festering nest of stray animals, sniping neighbors, grifters, crooks, and layabouts, as it primes for a particularly troublesome wedding. Car-eating pigs, humping dogs, begging gypsies, dwarf brides, gold-toothed paraplegic mobsters, hidden corpses: you’ll never be bored. Kusturica’s stories (and this movie could hardly function with just one) don’t always work, and his humor is often crude, but his films intend on being filthy, hungry parades of life and they succeed. It can get exhausting – picture a 2+-hour-long Serbian Little Caesars commercial – but who’s going to complain about a movie with too much stuff in it?

Meet the Parents (2000) This brutally comic hit found the lurking fears of every young lover meeting their prospective in-laws for the first time, and lit them up good – Ben Stiller is just, well, Ben Stiller, but his fiancee’s father (Robert De Niro) isn’t just a controlling, disapproving patriarch, he’s actually a semi-retired intelligence ramrod, with only his little girl now to serve and protect. Every step is the wrong step, every action is scrutinized mercilessly, Stiller’s anxious gaze of disbelief as each new mishap befalls him is a wonder, and De Niro flexes all of his dead-eyed menace.