Merry Christmas Dear Luminary readers. I have spent many hours pouring over classic films and dramas, together with a sprinkling of recent film releases, to provide you with a very special Christmas film and drama review like no other.
A review to transport and uplift you. It takes many hours to research and compile. I hope you love delving into review over the festive season and beyond. It was my love of the great film from the thirties to the nineties that sparked my interest in arts and culture journalism. I could happily live in a subterranean screening room in Soho! To make it different, I have sprinkled the review with some of the great film auteur classics that are set in winter or just because they are rather wonderful and designed to captivate you over the holiday season. I have also included a few recent gems. Sadly, there aren't enough films being made now that will become classics like The Third Man, Casablanca, Now Voyager, High Noon or Breakfast at Tiffany's.
To those of you who are paid subscribers, thank you. We urgently need more support as I continue to slowly recover my health after my serious injury in May 2021. You can support this independent magazine from £3 a month. Independent journalism has never been more important.
Merry Christmas, Alison Jane, Founder and Editor, December 2024
Films
The Bishops Wife
The Bishops Wife starring Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven directed by Henry Koster is a wickedly literate, mischevious and beautiful to look at Christmas film and witty morality tale about the dangers of become too high and mighty and forgetting what really matters in life.
David Niven as Grumpy Bishop!
Niven is Bishop Braun, a husband and father, who has become angry, disconnected and impossible, as he pursues a grandiose scheme to build a vast new cathedral with money from Gladys Cooper, who is mean and imperious as a woman who married for riches, not love.
In the meantime, his parishioners are struggling and his wife wonders what happened to the love and joy that used to fill their home.
Bishop Braun neglects his stoic, beautiful wife, Loretta Young, and risks losing her to Cary Grant's deliciously attentive and erudite angel, who grows increasingly amorous. Will Niven come to his senses or lose his wife to long lunches and fun skating trips with Dudley, Grant, as an angel who grows more and more like the devil in a Savile Row suit.
Amazon The Bishops Wife
You can buy the DVD on Amazon and Wob - World of Books has good second hand copies. Charity shops and thrift shops are a great place to pick up mint condition DVDs of classic films.
Aloha
Aloha, director Cameron Crowe's fascinating, prescient, spiritual love letter to Hawaii, to idealism and the dangers of mad, bad billionaires and America's occupation of the country was made a decade too soon in 2015. It's the film to revisit now and ignore all the critics who ruthlessly disparaged the film. Crowe's film was and is very inconvenient for America's war hawks.
The film stars a fine ensemble cast consisting of Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinsky and Bumpy Kanahele as himself and the man whose t-shirt says it all - Hawaiian by birth, American by force.
Aloha - Buy the DVD from Amazon, HMV or charity shop
Stream it on Netflix
Amazon
Apple TV
The Children Act
The Children Act, based on the novel by Ian McEwan is a well-crafted film with a compelling central performance by Emma Thompson as a senior judge who has to make a life and death decision about a teenage boy, when refuses a blood transfusion on religious grounds.
At the same time, Fiona Maye refuses to deal with her husband's (Stanley Tucci's) frustration and discontent at the lack of intimacy and love in their marriage, which leads to a brief, protest affair. This is not a Christmas film and the ending rather negates all the effort made to save the life of a precocious young man brilliantly acted by Fionna Whitehead. Watch The Children Act because it is a British film with really good performances and a fascinating glimpse into the arcane rituals and legal workings of the British justice system with all its pomp and privilege. In the end, the law is powerless when a vulnerable young man becomes too attached to the judge who saved his life.
The Children Act
Stream the Children Act on Netflix and Amazon or buy the DVD on Amazon.
The Holly and the Ivy
Curl up on a winter's eve and watch The Holly and the Ivy, a 1952 film set at Christmas in the English countryside about bright young things, the winds of social change and the turmoil that erupts during a family Christmas between the generations. The film is a time capsule of fifties Britain. Between the old and the new It is notable for its stellar cast, lead by the marvellous Ralph Richardson as a country parson who fuses over his parishioners while his adult children feel neglected and unhappy.
A Portrait of a Fifties Fashion J0urnalist
It's women who dominate this interesting film. Margaret, a clever, high flying fashion journalist lost the man she loved during WW2 and then she lost the child she kept secret, because he born out of wedlock because it would be a scandal in fifties Britain. Margaret is adrift and inconsolable, until she is able to talk to her father and he shows her unconditional love. While her sister, Celia Johnson, who plays the dutiful daughter, secretly wants to marry her boyfriend, an engineer, who is both annoying, reactionary and interesting!
The family dynamics really make this film a great watch. Revel in the annoying, interfering, difficult aunts and the parson's son, Denholm Elliott, who has no real purpose in life and isn't clever life his father and two sisters. He is sly, bored and entitled.
The Holly and the Ivy is notable for its talented cast led by Ralph Richardson, Margaret Leighton, Celia Johnson, Denholm Elliott and John Gregson.
The Holly and Ivy
Stream it On ITVX St
When Harry Met Sally
The Orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally still is still without equal in the history of rom coms. Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal have great chemistry and Nora Ephron's script fizzes with nail on the head brilliant barbs about sex, love, ambition, hypocrisy, getting on and the allure of the big apple. It's a very New York kind of film. I never tire of revisiting the film, usually at Christmas.
Amazon When Harry Met Sally
The Wedding Night
The Wedding Night is an early, 1935 heartbreakingly beautiful rom com starring Gary Cooper before he was packaged into the strong and silent type and the other Garbo, Anna Sten, as the incandescent woman he falls for in the snow. Buy the DVD to treasure on eBay or watch it on a certain site beginning with A and take in a fascinating film about the American Dream, class dynamics (yes, in America too) the position of women and the brutal aspirations of an immigrant farmer who is building an empire in land and uses his daughter as a commodity to be sold against her will to a man she cannot stand, with profoundly terrible consequences.
Amazon The Wedding Night
The Holiday
The Holiday is the perfect classic rom com film for escapism at Christmas. It might be corny, but aren't we looking for more corny in our lives? Nancy Meyers script distills the game of love and also offers a heartfelt celebration to great screenwriters who created such immortal lines as " here's looking at you kid."
This glittery rom flits effortlessly between snow Surrey and LA and features four beautiful, successful people, with mostly enviable lives, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Cameron Diaz and Jack Back and an inspired fifth actor, the legendary Eli Wallach who plays the last of the great screen writers. Kate Winslet shines as the journalist stuck in a toxic co-dependancy with her horribly controlling ex, Rufus Sewell, and Wallach steals the film with all the best lines about meet cutes, ageing, the evolution of Hollywood and enduring love on an off the silver screen.
Amazon The Holiday
Second Hand DVD's from WOB, Ebay, your local charity shop.
Elf
Elf starring Will Ferrell, directed by John Favreau is a captivating classic Christmas film that appeals to adults as much as children because it offers a message of hope, redemption and a huge dose of Christmas Spirit.
Of course, the film is nothing without the comic genius of Will Ferrell, who plays Buddy, a human orphan, who is brought up by elves at The North Pole with a manic charisma and elvish vulnerability that contrasts with his biological father's steely cynicism.
Visually, the film is thrilling with plenty of mishaps, hijinks and high drama at Christmas to make Elf a must-see film to watch and imagine Santa coming to visit whether you are nine or ninety.
Stream Elf on Amazon
White Christmas
So, there is no snow this Christmas. No problem. Just watch White Christmas for a Hollywood Christmas classic. Bing Cosby and Danny Kaye play army buddies who form a successful song and dance act. During a skiing holiday, the boys come to the rescue of an inn which gets into financial trouble because there ain't no snow!
Stream White Christmas on Amazon or Buy the DVD
Kitty Foyle
Ginger Rogers garnered an Oscar for her revelatory dramatic performance as the fearlessly independent heroine Kitty Foyle in this 1940 firecracker of a film which heralds the coming of the independent career woman, long before Annie Hall.
There is a dance scene in Kitty Foyle, just don't expect any Fred and Ginger moves. The scene is devoted to hopeless romance and staying up all night as wedding bells loom.
Rogers is marvellous as Kitty, a whip smart young woman and daughter of an Irish immigrant teacher. Kitty falls for a mainliner, slang for a wealthy scion from an old Quaker family and it doesn't work out because her man has no clue how to survive without the family money. Roger's brilliant young woman negotiates her way through tragedy and heartbreak, earns her own living, and chooses an idealistic doctor as her husband to be, knowing he is more in love with her than she is with him. Reader, the trouble is I prefer the man she married for crazy love! How about you?
Kitty Foyle
Stream Kitty Foyle on Amazon Also Available on BBC iPlayer with a TV License
Our Souls at Night
Our Souls at Night starring acting luminaries Robert Redford and Jane Fonda will pull you in and delight you immediately as it wraps you up in its gentle, beguiling, intelligent story about family, loneliness and how age and wisdom has so much to offer through the generations. Two widowed people, Redford and Fonda, find love and companionship again after Fonda's character bravely asks her neighbour if he will come and sleep with her at night and talk to her to banish her loneliness after years as a widow.
It's a thrill to see Fonda and Redford together again, after they first appeared in Barefoot in the Park as newly weds in the 1967 rom com. More than fifty years on, they exude the magnetism of two great actors who can portray ageing on screen with grace, charisma, acceptance, twinkling fun and authenticity.
Our Souls At Night
Steam Our Souls at Night on Netflix
The Last Holiday
Alec Guinness is magnetic as George Bird, an everyman who is transformed into a dynamic, fascinating man who wins friends and influences the rich and powerful when he is wrongly told by his doctor that he has a rare terminal illness.
A Fantastic Man
Suddenly, when he imagines he only has weeks to live, he wins at life and is offered jobs and excels at everything he touches including croquet and advising industrial magnates on new inventions.
Guinness is wonderful and so is the ensemble cast who reveal so much about the haves and have nots. Suddenly, George meets the doctor who discovered the rare condition he has been diagnosed with and he is told that it is impossible, as he is too healthy to have the disease. Suddenly, George realises he has everything to live for with the help of his new friends.
Suddenly, when everything is on the up for George, he crashes into a lorry on his way back to the hotel to avoid an infirm dog where he is awaited for a celebration dinner. He dies in hospital asking the nurse to let his friends know how much he loved them.
Reader, I hate the ending! It's so cynical and depressing thanks to JB Priestley. Why shouldn't George live and enjoy a wonderful new life. Nevertheless, this is a brilliant and captivating British film right up to the last five minutes.
Last Holiday
Stream The Last Holiday on ITVX
A Castle for Christmas
A Castle for Christmas starring Brooke Shields and Cary Elwes is the perfect, sugar rush of a Christmas rom com that doesn't pretend to be anything other than a tartan fairytale set in a picture perfect Scottish village, with charming villagers. Yes, it is corny and predictable, with a battle between Sophie Brown with her new money as an American-Irish best selling writer of romantic fiction and Elwes as an impoverished, Oxbridge educated duke struggling to keep the lights on a the castle and stop the bank taking it all.
Isn't that just what we want at Christmas? The real star is the dog, Hamish, along with the castle. What lingers is the idea of a real community, the joys of knitting and an alliance between old and new money to keep the castle and look after the villagers.
A Castle for Christmas
Stream A Castle for Christmas on Netflix
Five More Films to Watch
Find Me Falling - Harry Connick Jr as a hot, runaway rock star living on a cliff in Cyprus who crashes into the life of his feisty ex, a local doctor, with a secret. Watch it for its low key charm, black comedy, gallery of locals and because there is a glorious lack of car chases, brain dead scripts and bad acting. The music is great too, naturally.
Journey to Italy - Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as a wealthy English couple at war on an intimate road trip to Italy. Revel in Bergman's sublime clothes, the Bentley, the archaeology of Pompeii and Naples in the fifties and for the miracle at the end between wicked George and Ingrid. Italian culture has never been so strange, so stepped in antiquity and allure.
Journey to Italy - Stream It on the BFI Website
Autumn Sonata - Ingrid Bergman plays a concert pianist visiting her daughter played by Liv Ullman in this exquisite film directed by Ingmar Bergman.
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris - For lovers of haute couture and the transformative power of a flight of fantasy scarlet dress and for those who truly believe in fairytales, aspiration and the power of a dream to take a cleaning lady to Paris, to purchase a Dior gown and transform her life the house of Dior. Lesley Manville is marvellous as Mrs Harris.
Stream Mrs Harris Goes to Paris on Netflix
Stream Autumn Sonata on the BFI Website
Sense and Sensibility - Flawless, beautifully acted adaptation of Jane Austen's book about three sister's whose lives are cruelly changed by reduced circumstances because the family estate goes to their silly brother and his ghastly, scheming wife on the death of their father. Stars Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman.
Stream Sense and Sensibility on Netflix
Dramas and Series
Black Adder Christmas Special A Christmas Carol, After Dickens
A Christmas Carol in the style of Charles Dickins by Blackadder. What a dastardly brilliant idea. Rowan Atkinson is a perfect Scrooge aided and abetted by a stellar cast of Victorian miscreants to dispense the awful truth about the haves and have nots.
Come on Rowan Williams and the gang, we need Black Adder to return. Now more than ever, we need satire and to send up all the things that are wrong or don't work in the UK in 2024, with hope for 202
Black Adder a Christmas Carol
Emily in Paris
Emily in Paris 4 is worth watching again for the brilliant way it deals with both the magic of Christmas and the challenges, and the idea that sometimes nothing goes right. From the nightmare of a Christmas with your pregnant ex girlfriend and her pushy family to the promise of a new love when least expected. Anything can happen, including meeting a sartorial Italian goat herd ( who is really the scion of a fashion house) on top of a mountain who rescues you from calamity and then skies off into the sunset at Megeve.
Emily in Paris 4 Stream it on Netflix
Thirty Rock
Thirty Rock! What is there to say, apart from the fact that Liz Lemon, Tina Fey, is a perfectly imperfect princess of nerds and that the political incorrectness rules. thank goodness.
Stream Thirty Rock on Netflix or Buy the Series
The Woman in White
The Woman in White is based on Wilkie's Collins sensational Victorian mystery novel which became an international cause celebre.
The BBC 2018 adaptation starring Olivia Vinall, Jessie Buckley, Ben Hardy and Dougray Scott is faithful to the thrilling, suspenseful, beautifully crafted tone of the book which has captivated readers for more than 15o years.
Curl up on winter's evening over Christmas, and immerse yourself in a refined, chilly, Victorian melodrama about sisters, the rights of women, an heiress, identity theft, gold diggers, asylums, stately homes, greed and above all love.
This BBC drama features a talented cast, very fine direction and great tension and you will be caught up in the story and mystery until the very last frame.
The Woman in White
Stream the Woman in White on Netflix or buy the DVD
Suits
Suits, the dazzling legal eagle drama with wasp script writing that could only be written by an insider, is now on Netflix, so you can either discover the series for the first time or watch it again and marvel at the far too accurate portrayal of rapacious big law firms who run on billable minutes per second, lines from the Godfather films and outrageous levels of ambition and chanting the mantra - " greed is good".
The lawyers are the stars and their adversaries who are utterly focused on money, power, sex, ambition, sabotage and gladitorial wordplay combat in the court room and the office.
Suits
Stream Suits on Netflix or buy the DVD Series
The Durrells
And finally, for sheer animal magic, a zingy script, teenage growing pains, much-needed escape from Blighty (right now) and the idea of halycon summer days in another country, watch the perfect adaptation of The Durrells on Netflix. Maybe, it might provide the seeds for a new life.
Copyright All Rights Reserved. Alison Jane Reid/The Luminaries Magazine December 2024. No copying in any format or Ai use whatsoever with written permission.
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