Ask someone to name the best New Year’s Eve movies, and they’ll likely come back with either a great movie that includes one memorable New Year’s Eve scene, or a terrible movie centered around the holiday itself. That’s all well and good, but if you’re in the mood for a post-Christmas movie that keeps up the holiday spirit without necessarily reminding you of the other holidays that just ended, you don’t need to stick around Boogie nights, The imaginary thread, When Harry Met Sallyor dinner (Or in any case, you don’t need to use New Year’s as an excuse to watch or re-watch any of them.) And rest assured: you will never need to throw away New Year’s Eve or 200 cigarettesnever. There may not be a wealth of great New Year’s Eve movies, but there is a solid selection of them good New Year’s Eve movies from the last century or so. Instead of subjecting yourself to a cacophony of musical performances (or a comedy show by Garry Marshall’s band), consider ringing in the new year by time-traveling through this mix of classics and wonders in which the holiday plays a central role. If you want to stay home for New Year’s Eve (or need something to watch from the couch the next day), one of these should do the job.
After the thin man (1936)
The skinny manthe first mystery comedy featuring married quasi-detectives Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy), is set during the Christmas season, and one of the most cheerful aspects of the sequel (the first of five sides featuring Powell and Loy) is that it heads straight into the New Year. ; Do you see more Christmas entertainment appropriate to follow this path? Now, it is After the thin man As good as the original? No, it’s not. This is one of those series where the former is the one everyone loves the most, and for good reason. But it’s also one of those series where the opportunity to spend more time with its main characters as they joke, bicker, and solve additional mysteries is still a welcome, seasonal celebration; Nick and Nora are basically hosting a mystery New Year’s Eve party that she’s not desperate to leave. Unfortunately, the series abandons its holiday progression after this installment; The extra portions are probably better appreciated if you head straight for Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, etc.
vacation (1938)
Although the title refers to the plans Johnny Case (Cary Grant) has to take a well-deserved vacation after years of hard work, much of the pivotal action in this classic romantic drama from director George Cukor takes place on New Year’s Eve. Over the course of the evening, Johnny finds himself increasingly attracted to the free-spirited Linda (Katharine Hepburn), his fiancée’s older sister — and during a lavish engagement party thrown by his future, business-minded father-in-law, no less. Infused with Cukor’s gentle touch combined with Grant and Hepburn’s undeniable chemistry, vacation It’s essentially a New Year’s resolution film, with the encouraging twist that Johnny is trying to fulfill his promise of passion, freedom, and entertainment, rather than holding himself to strict standards of capitalist self-improvement.
Repeat performance (1947)
As a recent series from the Criterion Channel pointed out, there are plenty of noir-adjacent thrillers and thrillers set at Christmas. There are fewer movies centered around New Year’s Eve, and fewer movies that use the holiday as an excuse for a themed fantasy. Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) is literally jumping the gun on the new year, as the film begins with her standing over her murdered husband with a smoking gun in hand. (Sorry, she has a few.) But on the morning of January 1, she woke up a full year early—her husband was alive, had done nothing wrong, and had magically been given a second chance. The film follows her attempts to steer her life away from killing, raising questions about fate, the universe, and whether we are doomed to repeat our worst impulses. For more physicality, Leslie’s character is an actress – but when dealing with what looks like fate, aren’t we all?
Ocean 11 (1960)
Look, let’s be real: the Soderbergh-Clooney version of Ocean’s 11 is the best. Much better; One of the best of its kind. But the Rat Pack’s version with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. (among others) is the one that puts their heist on New Year’s Eve, and it’s an inspired idea. Better yet, the arc of this previous crack at this material is undoubtedly emblematic of New Year’s: you start out excited to see a bunch of familiar faces, and you start to feel bored and wonder if you’ve arrived too early as the party meanders along. In the early stages, you get more excited and busy once the clock gets closer to midnight and everything starts to feel lively, and you feel a bit let down in the aftermath as the evening amounts to a long setup with a mediocre entertaining line.
More American Graffiti (1979)
Did you know there was a sequel to George Lucas’s 1973 film? American graffitiAnd that it shares a title with the second volume of the original film’s soundtrack? Although it’s not as great as the original (which basically means it’s not one of the best films of the 1970s), More American Graffiti He came up with an inventive and exaggerated solution to follow an ensemble story over the course of one eventful night. Instead of reuniting all the characters who, as the final moments of the previous film indicated, are unlikely to see each other in the same place at the same time again, the sequel contains four different stories, each taking place on successive New Year’s Eves in 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967, intermittent but easily readable thanks to the different characters and styles of each time period. The way the story splits into a dark war farce, an almost dystopian domestic drama, and a history of youth culture perfectly captures the disparate (and sometimes disappointing) paths the characters find themselves on. Of course the movie has to shift to New Year’s; As adults, the characters can no longer rely on years of schooling and the accompanying rituals to mark the passage of time. More widespread by design, American graffiti It may not be as strong as its predecessor, but as a holiday-themed follow-up, it’s a great experience.
Evil New Year (1980)
The post-Halloween boom provided two New Year’s-themed horror films in 1980. Terror train It’s the most traditional entry: the masked killer, young people who are disgraced at an astonishing rate, Jamie Lee Curtis, with the added bonus of an Agatha Christie gimmick: most of the action takes place on a moving train. But there was an even better train-themed New Year’s movie coming down the track. Fast 80’s weirdness Evil New Year— which began filming in mid-October and came out just in time for the titular holiday two months later! – Wins a holiday-themed spot. Although the killer at the end wears a half-heartedly creepy mask (a caricature of Stan Laurel, no less!) across time zones), it’s a serial killer thriller, as we see the man’s face from the jump. The de facto final girl is a glamorous DJ (Rose Kelly) who hosts a live countdown show throughout the evening, ringing year-round from coast to coast as “punk” and “new wave” bands described in the film. (The two real-life bands featured, Shadow and Made in Japan, are more pop metal and power pop, respectively.) The live footage and accompanying neon lighting give this 86-minute film an extra boost of modernity; It’s not exactly terrifying, but it’s perversely entertaining and has a real holiday vibe, giving the Dick Clark-style telecast a menacing, purgatorial feel that now doubles as a time capsule. And also related Theme song By rips shadow.
Ghostbusters II (1989)
It’s not as good as the first one Ghostbusters; The cast seems to be cheerfully trotting along, rather than enthusiastically inspiring, the story engages in some slow resets before bringing the group together, and the tone seems more geared toward the surprising number of young fans picked up by the first film. However, that last bit also makes this sequel a solid choice for families for the New Year, especially considering that the plot revolves around a river of pink slime under New York City that feeds off of bad vibes and negativity. Is it a bit corny for Ghostbusters to rally troubled citizens to their cause by animating the Statue of Liberty with a “positively charged” slime and using it as a way to generate feelings of togetherness? No, it is To the fullest extent corny. But it’s also a funny and entertaining alternative to the pure hell people have to experience watching the ball drop in Times Square.
Major cities (1990)
What less like New Year’s Eve movies New Year’s Eve and 200 cigarettes What goes wrong is their understandable insistence on packing as much crazy action into one night as possible within 24 hours or so; What is white stillman Major cities What’s true is how the last week of the entire year, when schools are often closed and offices are often shuttered, can feel like a sad climax to something, even if we’re not entirely sure it is. This is especially true of youth breakout, and Stillman’s film is one of the greatest breakout youth films (admittedly a niche subgenre), as it revolves around a group of upper-class college-age friends who often attend balls. Depp and after-parties during (but not necessarily) the holiday season. They speak and assume attitudes appropriate to their social status, while perhaps beginning to catch a glimpse of the world outside that youthful bubble, and the countless opportunities for failure and disappointment that await there. Such a cool Stillman The last days of discoIt’s about being in the party season and starting to see the end in sight.
Peter’s friends (1992)
Peter’s friends He is basically British The big cold Where the reunion takes place over New Year’s weekend rather than being forced by tragedy – although there is a touch of the tragic in this dramatic drama co-written by comedic actress Rita Rudner (who also has a supporting role as the famous wife outside of the film) of a group of friends almost far apart). It’s easy to see why it seems less zeitgeist than that The big cold She did in her day; The 15-year gap between college in 1968 and reunion in 1983 seems much more eventful than Peter A journey from 1982, when the friends worked together in some sort of insufferable performance troupe, to adulthood in 1992 (although the overly familiar soundtrack pieces are at least less putrid today than some of those songs). The big cold needle drops). What makes the film so memorable, and a worthwhile evocation of the holiday, is the way director Kenneth Branagh (who also plays one of the friends) captures the simultaneous kindness and spitefulness of old friends, especially those with a flair for the dramatic. At the center is a lovely, understated performance from Stephen Fry as Peter, a privileged young man who comes to a crossroads seemingly by accident, for reasons that become clearer as the film goes on. If you’re missing your old school friends on New Year’s, Peter’s friends It can offer some alternatives, or perhaps remind you of what headaches group dynamics can cause.
Strange days (1995)
One of director Kathryn Bigelow’s best — and sleepiest features on her initial release — Strange days The film takes place during the last few days of 1999, generating turn-of-the-millennium tension that becomes more subtextual during the actual films from 1999; Maybe Y2K struck enough real nerves to make the filmmakers back down. Strange daysco-written by James Cameron, certainly doesn’t hold back, at least for most of its running time: it involves police brutality and digitally augmented life in a way that feels like it’s pressing a bunch of hot buttons in ’95, and is back to feeling fresh again decades later. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a savvy bad guy, sells illegal memory recordings designed to allow people to live through the experiences of others, with all the depravity, excitement, violence and sadness that entails; It’s like a terrible solution to Instagram FOMO that someone at Facebook is probably working on recreating at this very moment. When one of Lenny’s memory drives turns out to contain evidence of a murder, he and his old friend Mace (Angela Bassett) are drawn into a dangerous conspiracy. If you tend to experience another year as if you’re on the verge of disaster, Strange days It’s tense and paranoid enough to give you a solution, but it’s not too dark (maybe even, in the end, a little too squishy) to fry your brain.
Four rooms (1995)
Once viewed as a huge disappointment in the way that only “Quentin Tarantino’s directorial follow-up to Pulp Fiction” could have been, the fullness of time has revealed Four rooms As an uneven novelty – also known as an anthology film, a format that gets a bad reputation for its inability to produce flawless gems. But clearly flawless is not what is eclectic Four rooms It plays because it presents a quartet of entertaining stories taking place in the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, all of which involve green and weary bell ringer Ted (Tim Roth). Alison Anders, Alexander Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Tarantino all attempt to torture poor Ted, and while the results are mixed, the clips are quick and entertaining enough to make the whole thing worthwhile as a tour through other people’s free time. Rodriguez’s slapstick segment “The Misbehavers” was clearly a preconception of his Spy kids The series, and Tarantino’s The Man From Hollywood, a riff on old episodes featuring Alfred Hitchcock, is the perfect place to hang out in the post-fame/pre-dawn hours.
highball (1998)
Noah Baumbach wouldn’t put this movie on this list. Noah Baumbach, by all indications, would have preferred this film not to exist; It was made with the time and money left over from his second film Mr. Jealousyand according to the director, was never properly finished – a failed experiment released on the home video market with Baumbach’s pseudonymous name removed from the writing and directing credits (although he remains properly credited as an actor; yes, like Tarantino, he appears in His own movie here, and it’s very funny.) But you shouldn’t listen to Noah Baumbach on this particular issue, because highball there with Mistress America and Kicking and screaming As one of his funniest films, it is a purely comedic gloss on its usually sharp explorations of social aesthetics and relationship dynamics. The whole thing doesn’t actually unfold on New Year’s; This is the final part of a trilogy of party sequences with the same loose group of friends (including… Major cities‘s Chris Eigeman!) come together in the same Brooklyn apartment: a birthday party, a Halloween party, and a New Year’s event, with a variety of relationships that ebb and flow at parties and off-screen in between. Birthday Party is the most grounded of the elegantly vulgar comedy, revolving around the presence of Felix (Carlos Jaquot), an idiot whom Travis (Christopher Reed) considers his best friend in a familiar, inexplicable way. The Halloween party is the funniest, with lots of costume shenanigans (including Baumbach accidentally dressing up as Hitler). But the film’s strange and uncomfortable soul is the New Year’s segment, where the characters’ regret and confusion really take shape.
Snow hole (2013)
Aren’t holidays like New Year’s just social establishments, anyway? If you want a deconstructive approach to vacation, consider Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi thriller Snow holewhich (like the non-classical New Year Terror train) mostly takes place on a moving train. In the aftermath of a new Ice Age apocalypse, the remaining humans are packed (or, if you’re rich, comfortably spaced out) onto a massive 10-mile-long train, which circles the frozen globe in an endless loop. To celebrate their journey around the planet, the train’s residents countdown to the New Year every time it passes a historic bridge — more often than the typical 365-day calendar, but when the entire planet is covered in ice and snow, what’s the difference? ? If you want to chase your pessimism with the faintest glimmer of hope about the dawning of a new year, while acknowledging how arbitrary this particular sign can be, just hop on board Snow hole He trains.
