A list of movies by the Guardian reporters to keep you entertained this festive season.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Here it is — set to be the biggest film of the year, or maybe the decade. It’s the movie that many think George Lucas should have given us in 1999, instead of the massive creative mistake that was the prequel-trilogy beginning with The Phantom Menace.
Carol
Todd Haynes’s superbly directed and designed movie is based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith and features outstandingly intelligent performances from Cate Blanchett as the elegant, soon-to-be-divorced Carol in 1950s New York and Rooney Mara as Therese, the young department store assistant who falls in love with her.
Snoopy & Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie
The new Peanuts animation is co-written by Craig and Bryan Schulz, respectively son and grandson of the strip’s original creator, the late Charles M Schulz.
A Christmas Horror Story
This horror-comedy gives us the dark side of Christmas. According to ancient European folklore, Krampus is the evil twin, or wicked brother, or anyway the dark mirror-image of Santa Claus himself.
Spectre
James Bond is back and Daniel Craig is back in a terrifically exciting, spectacular, almost operatically delirious 007 adventure — endorsing intelligence work as old-fashioned derring-do and incidentally taking a stoutly pro-Snowden line against the surveillance that undermines the rights of a free individual. It’s pure action mayhem with a real sense of style.
The Lady in the Van
Maggie Smith gets the chance to play someone grander than the Dowager Countess of Grantham, although with the same piercing stare of disapproval, pinched lips and bird-like head movements, as she assesses the unsatisfactory nature of everything around her. She plays Miss Shepherd, the “lady in the van”, in this very enjoyable film directed by Nicholas Hytner and adapted by Alan Bennett from his memoir about the haughty, cantankerous homeless woman who bullied him into having her chaotic camper van in his driveway for 15 years.
The Little Prince
The new animated adaptation of the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tale, with Kung Fu Panda’s Mark Osborne directing, is not a direct adaptation. This is a Disneyfied empowerment yarn about a nine-year-old girl whose life is overturned by an eccentric neighbour.
For full report see Mail & Guardian
