The group dynamics involved in choosing a movie are complex, especially when family is involved. It gets 100 times worse in December. Hollywood knows this. That’s why the big holiday movies are designed to have maximum demographic appeal. The studios want to provide a destination that works for you and the kids and Grandma and the relatives from out of town.
The happy news is that there are always a few bold films looking to counterprogram against all that—like, for instance, a transgressive erotic thriller about dominance, submission, and forbidden workplace lust. America!
Babygirl, from the Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn, stars Nicole Kidman as a middle-aged executive tempted into a severely inappropriate romance with a hot young intern (Harris Dickinson). Hollywood used to make movies like this all the time—think Body Heat or Fatal Attraction—but the genre retreated among 21st-century anxieties and concerns: power dynamics, age-gap relationships, intimacy coordinators.
Advance word on Babygirl is that the film deliberately plays with our expectations around all this and provides some shocking surprises. Which is good! That’s what thrillers are supposed to do. It’s also a good sign that Nicole Kidman is on board. She’s one of our most fearless screen actors—if you haven’t already, check out the 2018 indie Destroyer. Her performance in Babygirl won the Best Actress prize at this year’s Venice International Film Festival.
For another holiday counterprogramming option, consider the highly anticipated Nosferatu, director Robert Eggers’s remake of the 1922 silent-film classic. This one promises to be very family unfriendly—a gruesome and moody Gothic horror film soaked in dread, violence, and evil sex. Bringing the visiting in-laws would essentially be an act of aggression.
For those of us who enjoy this sort of thing, Nosferatu looks like one of the year’s best films. Like director F. W. Murnau’s original, the story is an id-first adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, heavy on sex and death. Lily-Rose Depp takes the lead female role as Ellen, a disturbed 19th-century teenager who makes a series of poor decisions concerning window latches. Bill Skarsgård plays the sinister Count Orlock, and Willem Dafoe has the Van Helsing role.
Eggers is the perfect filmmaker for this material. His previous films—The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman—feel less like movies than soft spots in the time-space continuum. His movies transport the viewer, and not always in a pleasant way. Early reviews of Nosferatu suggest that this is Eggers’s masterpiece.
Finally, in the event that you actually do need a movie for the whole family, you can’t go wrong with the Ninth Annual NY Dog Film Festival, a traveling exhibition of short films dedicated to the canine spirit.
This presentation is actually a two-hour compilation of narrative, animated, and documentary short films about dogs and the people who love them. The festival travels to theaters in the United States and Canada, with a percentage of revenue going to local rescue organizations. It’s playing locally at the Carolina Theatre in Durham through December 22, and it may pop up elsewhere—check your local listings.
Cat lovers, don’t fret. The Carolina is also screening this year’s NY Cat Film Festival—same deal, same dates. And according to online materials, both short-film collections are safe for kids.
Quick Picks
The biographical drama A Complete Unknown features Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan right around the time he switched to electric guitars at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Daniel Craig headlines the period drama Queer, set in 1950s Mexico City, based on the novella by William S. Burroughs and directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name).
Tolkien nerds looking for a holiday fix may want to check out The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime adaptation set 180 years before the original trilogy. Miranda Otto reprises her role as Éowyn (she’s the narrator).
Hugh Grant plays the heavy in the psychological horror film Heretic, featuring two unfortunate Mormon missionaries, a creepy old house, and some intense theology debates.
For anyone looking to brush up on their ancient history, The Return is a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, with Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. High school students, check with your teachers, I think you can get extra credit for this.
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