This Christmas, there should certainly be the traditional embarrassment of riches for the film consumer. The big TV networks are brooding over which Yuletide biggies to unveil; ITV1 is rumoured to be considering Dr Dolittle. But it's not like it was 20 or 30 years ago, when we picked obvious winners from bumper Christmas editions of the Radio Times and TV Times. There's an avalanche of films on terrestrial, cable, digital and satellite that you can record on your spanking new DVD recorders, as well as the loads on disc and tape to be ordered on the internet from the US. Big-screen choices are probably more manageable, and maybe more rewarding. The big releases always fall off towards the end of the year, but there are still some interesting highlights as well as some obvious holiday specials.
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Dir: Peter Jackson
December 19
The first potential mighty megabuster since Harry Potter, and everyone involved must fervently be hoping that the speccy little wizard has not saturated the market for this sort of thing. Or else they are hoping that an older generation of ex-hippies will go to see the film in order to rediscover and re-invigorate their passion for arcana and myth, in the same spirit that they rebuild their Wishbone Ash album collections on CD. The Two Towers is out next year, and The Return of the King the year after that. My heart misgives, I confess, but Tolkien fans will almost certainly be mad for it.
Ernst Lubitsch season
Now showing
This retrospective of the great comic master is on in December at the National Film Theatre in London's South Bank Centre. Ninotchka with Greta Garbo; the jewel thief romantic comedy Trouble in Paradise; Angel with Marlene Dietrich; The Shop Around the Corner with Jimmy Stewart; Heaven Can Wait with Don Ameche; Design for Living, the Noel Coward re-working with Gary Cooper; and the acerbic Nazi satire To Be or Not To Be with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard - and many more.
The Hired Hand
Dir: Peter Fonda
December 28
Something spare to clean the palate after the rich Christmas fare. This restored version of Fonda's 1971 arthouse western is an absorbing novella of a movie about a drifter (Fonda) who returns to the wife and child he deserted years before and agrees to work as a hired hand on their homestead with his rootless buddy (Warren Oates). But he soon finds his revived uxorious ties of loyalty at odds with his male friendship. Now restored with loving attention to editor Frank Mazzola's distinctive, lugubrious fades and dissolves. A riveting film.
It's a Wonderful Life
Dir: Frank Capra
Yes, obviously this. One to get choked up to. It will naturally be all over the telly schedules like an inexpensive suit, but it is also hopping about various independent cinemas this Christmas, including the Tyneside cinema, the Metro in Derby, the Glasgow film theatre and the Hampstead Everyman.
The Deep End
Dir: Scott McGehee and David Siegel
December 14
Here is a cool and stylish thriller with a touch of Hitchcock for the Christmas season. It stars Tilda Swinton as an affluent, protective mom in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, who covers up for her gay son when his older lover's dead body is found - and then gets blackmailed by the dishy Goran Visnjic.
Beauty and the Beast
Imax, dir: Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
January 1
Disney's highly-regarded 1991 cartoon version of the old fable is to be given a new lease of life when it is re-released at the BFI Imax in London on New Year's Day (and later in the year at some other Imaxes). Seeing something on the impossibly giant screen is a theme-park ride in itself, especially if you sit near the front of the auditorium so that the screen entirely floods your field of vision.
Into the Deep (3D)
Imax, dir: Howard Hall
Now showing
...and speaking of Imax, you could do worse this Christmas than check this out at the BFI Imax if you've never seen a three-dimensional film before.
On its own, this is simply an ordinary sub-Cousteau doc about the undersea world, the kind of thing you get on Channel 5. But the third dimension really does seem pretty freaky as the fishes appear to float up to your nose. A very good children's treat.
Riding in Cars with Boys
Dir: Penny Marshall
December 7
This much-admired Drew Barrymore movie is a tough, unsentimental story of how a bright young woman got stuck in a bad marriage with a small child - just through riding in cars with boys. Based on a true story. Steve Zahn plays her father and Penny Marshall, of Big and Awakenings, directs.
Sons of the Desert
Dir: William A Seiter
December 29
As with It's a Wonderful Life, this 1933 Laurel and Hardy movie will almost certainly crop up on the television schedules. However, it also has a screening this Christmas at the Nottingham Broadway, and it's well worth checking out, with more than its fair share of wife-evading and ukelele-strumming. The new Simon Louvish study of Stan and Ollie (Faber, £25) has re-awakened interest here in the great comics, and they are still very funny - unlike some silver-screen icons we could mention.
Sing-a-long-a-Sound of Music
Dir: Robert Wise
Now showing
Again, this is a much-loved Christmas favourite for young and old, straight and gay. Come along to the Prince Charles cinema off Leicester Square in central London, bearing your plastic edelweiss or brown paper package tied up with string, and sing along to this timeless classic dressed as a nun, a Nazi or in some other picturesque ironic Austrian garb.
Bear in mind, however, that you may get jostled and jeered at by the drunk and decidedly un-ironic crowds outside.
