The holidays are a time for family, friends, and of course, good movies! Whether you’re looking for a classic Christmas film to watch with the whole family or a heartwarming holiday romance to cozy up with, there’s a perfect movie out there for everyone. So here is the list of the Best Movies For Holidays.
Lost in Translation (2003) – a platonic yet profound relationship
What do a young philosophy graduate and an actor past his prime, in Tokyo for a whiskey advertisement, have in common? Initially, both feel equally lost in Tokyo and in their own lives. The connection between Charlotte and Bob Harris is unexpected, atypical, and extremely nuanced. In their relationship, there’s attraction, friendship, and paternal advice, and actors Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson manage to rise to the script’s heights, creating a surprisingly credible couple. It is one of the Best Movies For Holidays.
Who hasn’t been enchanted by it? There might be a few dissatisfied ones saying that nothing happens in Lost in Translation and that, after all, the purpose of films is to tell a story. But others will smile involuntarily at the memory of it. Drama and comedy, atmospheric and metaphysical, Lost in Translation is a film about loneliness.
The loneliness of a twenty-something, Charlotte, who doesn’t know exactly what she wants from life, despite nuanced thinking. And the loneliness of Bob Harris, a bored and jaded actor in his 25-year marriage. The chemistry between the two unfolds into a friendship revolving around their dilemmas. The understanding each offers to the other doesn’t go beyond friendship, up to the final kiss. Many still wonder what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson before bidding farewell, probably forever.
Hunger: Best Movies For Holidays
If the name director Steve McQueen doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps Michael Fassbender’s does. And if you like it, you must see him in Hunger.
The role that brought attention to the super-talented actor Michael Fassbender was in Steve McQueen’s film, Hunger, from 2008, where Fassbender plays an Irish prisoner on a hunger strike.
Fish Tank
Immediately after Hunger, Fassbender is cast in Fish Tank, a film about life in British ghettos. Fassbender plays a worker who deflowers the teenage daughter of his lover. Watch the Fish Tank trailer. It is one of the Best Movies For Holidays.
Le Havre – Jim Jarmusch’s Finnish version
The film Le Havre, selected at Cannes in 2011, is directed by the Finn Aki Kaurismaki, stylistically related to the American Jim Jarmusch and a continuator of the traditions of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and Robert Bresson. Le Havre is a blend you’d think otherwise impossible: dry humor, fairy tale, lucidity, nostalgia, sensitivity, and realism. Compared to Intouchables, which aimed to be a demonstration of humanism without sentimentality and enthralled much of the audience, Kaurismaki’s achievement in Le Havre went unnoticed, probably because of the delicacy of the demonstration, remaining a pleasure for a few.
The story is simple: Marcel from the town of Le Havre, living off the little he earns from shining passersby’s shoes, tries to reunite an immigrant child from Africa with his mother. Meanwhile, Marcel’s wife is very ill and struggling for survival. Beyond the story, what matters is how it’s told, with humor and finesse.
The world of Le Havre is sad and modest, but it lives without resentments (class or otherwise). It lives by older societal rules, where emotions and feelings are seldom discussed because people know their place and guide their choices by the principles of duty and sacrifice. There’s no room for psychoanalysis and bourgeois sophistication.
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