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The Apartment
At the end of any especially troublesome year it’s always good to revisit The Apartment, Billy Wilder’s brilliantly bleak comedy of office politics and festive bad cheer. It memorably ends on the stroke of midnight as heartsick Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) abandons a drunken new year’s party to be with hapless, jobless CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) instead. Is The Apartment suggesting that Kubelik and Baxter then live happily ever after? Probably not, because I’ve never been convinced that these two lovers are going to stay the course. They’re too mismatched and desperate; their wounds are still too fresh. What the ending gives us is the next best thing: a sudden sense of hope and freedom, with everything packed in boxes except for a bottle, two glasses and a deck of cards. Nothing to lose and nowhere to go. “Shut up and deal.” A clean break, a fresh start. Xan Brooks
Strange Days
A flop on release – at a time audiences were facing an abundance of multiplex options – Kathryn Bigelow’s pre-millennial tech-noir has seen its reputation swell substantially over the decades. James Cameron and Jay Cocks’s screenplay straddles the 20th and 21st centuries: kick-ass chauffeur Angela Bassett strives to shake lovelorn VR addict Ralph Fiennes from his funk so as to unravel a conspiracy involving the LAPD. What follows is a cautionary tale about real-world structural flaws and the bedazzlements of the virtual realm; the source of Fatboy Slim’s “right here, right now” sample; and, most crucially, a propulsive, jolting, finally exhilarating thriller. Increasingly, when the clock strikes midnight on 1 January, it’s Bassett’s wearied “we made it” that sounds like a bell in my head. Mike McCahill
The Irony of Fate
Already most will struggle to recall the 2022 romcom About Fate. But not the 1976 New Year’s Eve classic on which it was based: The Irony of Fate, which is known by every Russian. The holiday misrule premise, beloved of many NYE flicks, works even more fruitfully in the far more rigid Soviet context: soon-to-be-married Moscow doctor Zhenya (Andrey Myagkov) mistakenly gets on a flight to Leningrad after his stag party. Thanks to identikit Soviet architecture, he drunkenly falls asleep in an apartment with the same address, where willowy Nadya (Barbara Brylska) is welcoming her cranky fiance, Ippolit (Yury Yakovlev, the Soviet John Cleese). The course of true love takes many screwball swerves, with the lead pair fanning the Slavic melancholy by often breaking out a guitar for one of Mikael Tariverdiev’s stunning songs. Epic but intimate, a kind of Kieślowskian import sets in as the night gets long; have these circling soulmates also left it too late in life? Phil Hoad
The Lord of the Rings
“The world is changed.” So begins Peter Jackson’s epic three-part adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s epic. I have a tradition where I get together with friends (some more enthusiastic than others, it must be said), and watch the full extended cut of the whole trilogy, every New Year’s Eve. The world has changed, you see: it’s a chance to reflect and look back over the year while enjoying a glorious trio of films whose comforting familiarity never breeds contempt. Instead, like a good marriage, the flaws are part of what you adore. Twelve hours well spent, we think you’ll agree. Catherine Bray
Sunset Boulevard
You want a bona fide, satisfaction-guaranteed classic, but also something that makes you glad you’re not going out – and Sunset Boulevard ticks both boxes handsomely. Especially since it contains what must be the bleakest New Year’s Eve party ever. To recap, William Holden’s husk of a screenwriter rocks up at faded starlet Gloria Swanson’s mansion in white tie, to discover he’s the only other guest. Eventually he storms out in search of genuine revelry, only to be reeled back in before midnight after Swanson melodramatically slashes her wrists. The new year is not going to be happy for either of them. Piercingly grim but also gloriously camp, Billy Wilder’s diamond-cut Hollywood hate letter merits endless rewatching, and you can have fun playing “spot the modern-day resonances”. From silents-to-talkies, substitute cinemas-to-streaming, lament how the pictures really have got small, and pledge to get out more next year. Steve Rose
The Shining
Movie pairings for the holidays are best kept simple, nothing fussy or fancy. In that spirit of not overthinking it, The Shining is perfect movie for New Year’s Eve. It’s a horror staple that never wears thin. Most people have seen it at least three times already, so you won’t need to hit pause to get the sausage rolls out of the oven (or if someone starts banging on about Kubrick faking the moon landing). The Shining is also a classic winter movie, ending with a snowstorm at the Overlook hotel where aspiring novelist and alcoholic Jack Torrance has been growing ever more homicidal over the winter. I first watched it aged nine or 10, plucking a VHS at random from the stack next to the telly, monitored with negligent parental guidance, and have watched it at least a dozen times since. I have my own nine-year-old now, but may give her another year before letting her join the party. Cath Clarke
The Poseidon Adventure
However damp a squib your New Year’s Eve, it’s always worth remembering that worse things happen at sea. And rarely do they get worse than the big wet hell in which the passengers of the SS Poseidon flounder in this most glorious and absorbing of disaster movies. No sooner have the corks popped to mark the start of 1972 than the warnings of captain Leslie Nielsen against going full speed ahead (an economising measure by the avaricious shipowners) are realised and the boat is bottom up in the middle of the Atlantic, with thousands meeting grisly and often quite creative ends.
A handful of survivors – including Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters – then slowly clamber up to the hull with only the wateriest hope of salvation. The tension is ratcheted slowly, the set pieces expert, the sentimentality diluted by real grit and upset. The star of the show, of course, is preacher Gene Hackman, sweatily brave to the end, when he sacrifices himself in a polo neck. In a year that began with the horrific news of his death, it’s salutary to see Hackman in his prime: tough and smart and sardonic, raging at God and rousing the rest of us to keep fighting. Catherine Shoard
Radio Days
If there’s one cry of “happy new year” that echoes down the decades, it’s from Woody Allen’s still-wonderful memoir of his boyhood years in 1940s New York. (Allen actually grew up in Brooklyn, on the other side of Jamaica Bay from Rockaway where this is set, but the windswept boardwalk he presumably visited as a kid was just too picturesque to pass up.) There are so many jewels contained within – “You think the Atlantic is a greater ocean than the Pacific?”, a communist Larry David, the burglars who win a radio phone-in competition, the Carmen Miranda singalong – that are worth it for themselves alone, but at its heart there’s an out-with-the-old in-with-the-new wistfulness to the whole thing. Filtered through one of Allen’s favoured tropes – the hazy, movie-fuelled nostalgia for the supposed sophistication of New York nightlife of the era – the film ends with a superbly maudlin final scene that via the medium of a live broadcast as 1943 turns into 1944, brings together Little Joe and his family with the radio superstars on the nightclub rooftop. It’s such a brilliant sequence, offering joy, hope and misery all rolled into a few minutes – watching it ought to be as compulsory as Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. (Radio Days supernerds might want to know: start the film at 10.07pm – and eight seconds – to line up the movie New Year countdown with the real one.) Andrew Pulver
Holiday
Many of the best Christmas-themed romantic comedies come from the 1940s, but their spiritual sibling Holiday got an earlier jump on a slightly later holiday; released in 1938, it’s maybe the best New Year’s Eve-set romcom. Much of it unfolds at a party, during which Johnny (Cary Grant), who has resolved to take some time off to recharge and rediscover himself after years of labour, is drawn toward Linda (Katharine Hepburn), the free-spirited sister of his fiancee. Released the same year as Hepburn and Grant’s better-known pairing in Bringing Up Baby, Holiday is the more reflective and romantic of the two, with lovely direction from George Cukor. The lead characters’ willingness to rebuke expectations of capitalistic productivity, and instead make meaningful promises about how to better live their lives, makes it a particularly inspired and heartening new year’s watch. Jesse Hassenger
La bonne année
For a happy new year with a French accent, try La bonne année (1973) directed by Claude Lelouch, a director whose films are too glossy and romantic to appeal to high-minded critics. In this non-linear narrative he channels his inner Jean-Pierre Melville by casting Lino Ventura, one of Melville’s favourite actors, as a convict out on Christmas parole and remembering a heist that went wrong. The robbery flashbacks alternate with his wooing of Françoise Fabian as the proprietor of an antiques shop next door to the targeted jewellery store, allowing granite-faced Ventura to show his goofy side. Seasonal delights include a drag queen miming to Mireille Mathieu singing Francis Lai’s title song – with Mathieu herself in the audience! If you can’t handle subtitles, Hollywood remade it as Happy New Year (1987), the highlight of which is Peter Falk disguising himself as an old lady. Anne Billson
Phantom Thread
Phantom Thread is pretty much the perfect movie for most occasions – Christmas, breakfast, date night, mid-food poisoning fever spiral – but one of its most effectively date-specific sequences takes place during New Year’s, a relatably tumultuous night for us all. She wants to go dancing, he wants to do nothing and in one of the movie’s most ravishingly orchestrated moments, he goes after her, forced to play prince and save her from the extravagant party chaos. It’s too little too late but in the hopeful, post dodgy omelette flash forward at the end, they’re dancing instead of arguing their way into a new year, a dream replacing a nightmare. Paul Thomas Anderson knows it’s usually a rotten night for most of us but he also knows that we still naively hope that next year might somehow be better. Benjamin Lee
When Harry Met Sally …
Appropriate for any New Year’s Eve, but even more so after this bummer of a month, When Harry Met Sally is a classic. Made 36 years ago, it still seems remarkably fresh. The uncertainties, the awkwardness, the miscommunications, these things are just as universal as they were in 1989. Nora Ephron’s script still sparkles. Rob Reiner’s direction is still note-perfect. Watching it will make you miss them both, but that’s the point. Press play at 10.30pm, and 2026 will ring in right as Billy Crystal declares his love for Meg Ryan on New Year’s Eve. What a hopeful way to see out a crappy year. Stuart Heritage
