Happy New Year, or Happy Hogmanay, as we say here in Scotland where Eye For Film Towers is located. As we welcome the arrival of 2023, we've assembled seven appropriately themed films for you to enjoy. We wish you all the best for the year to come.
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| The Apartment |
The Apartment - MGM, Apple TV
A black and white film about an exploited clerk’s affair with a depressed young woman might not sound much fun, but with Billy Wilder at the helm, this Sixties classic is entertaining throughout, witty and playful right up to the final scenes, set at New Year, when it suddenly gives way to something else, a torrent of emotion rushing in. It’s also acutely modern in its outlook, and was quite a handful for the censors of the time. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) climbs the ranks at work by lending his conveniently located apartment to assorted colleagues for their extramarital affairs, but when he sees the impact this behaviour has on Fran (Shirley MacLaine), his perspective begins to shift. Changing his behaviour makes him realise how few real friends he has – and that he is falling in love with Fran himself.
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| Bridget Jones’s Diary |
Bridget Jones’s Diary - ITVX, Brit Box
Amber Wilkinson writes: If there's one thing that everyone associates with New Year, it's resolutions. Bridget has plenty, including putting her knickers in the washing basket and "finding a nice sensible boyfriend". She also, perhaps most famously, wishes to "lose 20lb" (about 1.5st in old money). Although, if the fat jokes lack much of the nuance of the Helen Fielding source material, they are still nowhere near as awful as those in Love Actually. More importantly, despite being as messy as Bridget's life, this tale of "singleton" Bridget's delivers decently in terms of laughs and romance, featuring great supporting performances from Hugh Grant as Bridget's incorrigible boss Daniel Cleaver and Colin Firth as human rights lawyer Mark Darcy. Sequels The Edge Of Reason (on Amazon Prime) and Bridget Jones's Baby (on Netflix) are more slickly made but this one still has plenty of klutzy charm.
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| Phantom Thread |
Phantom Thread - Amazon, Google Play
If what appeals to you about New Year is the parties, you won’t find many films which satisfy like this tale of an acclaimed tailor (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the young assistant (Vicky Krieps) who becomes his muse. The film is blackly comic, the central relationship far from healthy, but on New Year’s Eve the assistant pulls away, declaring that she needs to go dancing. As he, initially determined to stay at work, races to join her for the bells, he finds himself lost in a swirls of taffeta dresses, joyful faces and fantastic costumes. The elephant in the room is literal and as he watches her laughing with strangers he realises, for the first time, how complete she is without him. It’s comedic and vicious, with deep feelings running just beneath the surface, all the headiness of the occasion overwhelming in the moment.
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| Fruitvale Station Photo: Lionsgate |
Fruitvale Station - MGM, Apple TV
Amber Wilkinson writes: Ryan Coogler's debut charts the true story of what happened during the final day of Oscar Grant - who was shot dead on the platform of a Californian train station in the early hours of New Year's Day in 2009. At the time of his death, Grant was unarmed and in handcuffs - real-life footage we see near the start of the film. By taking away any sense of sensationalism by showing us 'the end' before he starts, Coogler is able to build a complex and humanistic portrait of Grant, played by Michael B Jordan, that doesn't laud him as a saint or castigate him as irredeemable but shows him as a flawed trier who had resolved to be a better person. The winner of both the Grand Jury and audience awards at Sundance, its strength lies in the way Coogler connects the everyday elements of Grant's life to the viewer's making the sense of the ultimate injustice of what happened all the more acute.
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| The Time Machine |
The Time Machine - Amazon, Sky Store, Apple TV
For most people New Year is an occasion on which to reflect on the passing of time. In George Pal’s adaptation of the HG Wells classic, it’s an occasion for considering the nature of time itself, and for looking far ahead at what the future might hold. Wells’ legendary foresight here sees Rod Taylor’s Victorian inventor racing forward into the 1960s in the titular machine, and thereafter tracks the anxieties of that age as they merge into the author’s vision of a remnant humanity so long divided by class that it has split into two separate species, the sweet but useless Eloi and the nocturnal, subterranean, cannibalistic Morlocks. If change of this magnitude seems impossible, imagine yourself living back when the book was written and consider how strange the 2020s would look to you from there.
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| Snowpiercer Photo: Lionsgate |
Snowpiercer - Sky Go, Starz, Now Cinema
Amber Wilkinson writes: New Year comes around literally in Bong Joon-ho's dystopian tale, as the event is celebrated every time the train on which it is set completes a full circumnavigation of the world. The train is packed with Earth's last survivors, although they're neatly separated according to class in carriages which see the elite enjoying wall to wall luxury up front while the poor are packed into the rear. New Year will take on significance again as a resistance movement gets underway and Chris Evans' Curtis begins to battle his way to the front. This is an action film at heart, bolstered by an excellent cast that includes Tilda Swinton, Octvia Spencer, Jamie Bell and the much-missed John Hurt.
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| Carol |
Carol - Amazon Prime, Studiocanal
Everybody loves a New Year romance. Whilst nothing is straightforward for Therese (Rooney Mara) and Carol (Cate Blanchett), the glamorous older married woman whom she is pursuing in a censorious age, a New Year party provides a moment of magic when suppressed desire gives way to their first kiss. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s first novel, The Price Of Salt, Todd Haynes' exquisitely crafted film charts the course of a relationship with a lot of challenges to overcome. Its festive pivot is all the more significant because this was one of the first lesbian stories ever published with an optimistic ending, which not only promises a fresh start for its heroines, but anticipates a better life for many of its readers and viewers in the years to come.
