Review
Christmas culture
Culture
5 min read

Five Christmas films to revel in

Haunting, salving, teary, side-splitting and glorious - our recommended festive films.
Muppet characters dressed as Dickensian characters stand in a snowy street.
'Dickens made the fatal error of not putting Muppets into his story.'

‘Tis the season to be jolly and watching a good film with a cup of tea and a biscuit, while the freezing wind and rain whip at the window, can be one of the jolliest things you can do this year. The genre of ‘Christmas’ has only grown and grown over the decades, so if you’re stumped by the myriad of choices – often dreadful schlock that feature the word ‘Prince’ and ‘Christmas’ in the title superimposed over a picture of two ludicrously attractive people staring lovingly into each other’s eyes in a blizzard – take comfort in my Top 5 Christmas films. 

Note – this is my top 5. My personal top 5. These are not the ‘best’ Christmas films. You will not find It’s a Wonderful Life on here. It is glorious and lovely, but I saw it too late in life, and just don’t emotionally resonate with it as much as other Christmas films. I will not apologise. You will not see Die Hard. It is indeed and iconic action film, with a superb Alan Rickman performance, and it is indeed set at a Christmas party…but that isn’t enough to make it a ‘Christmas film’. I WILL NOT APOLOGISE! 

5. The Nightmare Before Christmas 

An animated scene shows a grandmother readng a story to children on her lap in front of a fire.

I would have put this film higher up the list if not for the fact that it straddles two seasons – All Hollows and Christmas. This film is iconic, however. The stop-motion animation gives the whole affair an extra haunting air. The music is superb – I still find myself humming What’s This every few weeks. The story is unhinged (what else do you expect from Tim Burton?) but to just the right degree, and behind the ghoulish setting and mad-cap story there is a good old-fashioned moral-of-the-story for children and adults alike to enjoy. Nightmare is a marvellous reminder of what it means to have the Christmas spirit, and the great thing about it is that it’s a film you can enjoy any time from October 31st! 

4. Bad Santa

A dishevelled looking Santa, without a beard, stares to the side.

Billy Bob Thornton is mesmerising as an ‘eating, drinking, sh***ing, f***ing Santa Claus’. This is not one for the kids! Thornton’s Willie T. Soke is a professional thief who, with his dwarf assistant, get jobs as a grotto Santa and Elf in shopping malls during the festive season so as to case the place and rob it…but this time is different. Soake’s degeneracy has become a serious liability, and his instability and vulgar sexual exploits catch the attention of John Ritter’s mall manager and Bernie Mac’s security chief. Soake is spiralling out of control, but perhaps a romantic relationship with Lauren Graham’s barmaid and a chance encounter with a vulnerable young boy (to whom Soake becomes the least appropriate father-figure) might just be his salvation, and teach him the spirit of Christmas. The script is jet-black funny, and all the performances are spot on – although this is entirely Thornton’s film to shine in. Lewd, rude, and crude, but with a heart of gold (deep down under all the effing and jeffing), this film is the perfect antidote for those who find the jollity of the festive season a little twee. 

3. The Holiday

A couple, wrapped up in winter clothes, flirt with each other.

This film has Jude Law in it. This ought to be enough to commend it to you, but I’ll go further. This film has Jude Law playing a jumper-wearing widowed single-dad, who can turn the humble napkin into a delightful children’s entertainment, and who gives smouldering glances across a crowded pub. Before you all rush out to watch it, let me finish the blurb. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslett are two women, unlucky in love, who decide to swap homes for the Christmas holiday. Winslett is escaping a toxic infatuation and finds solace in a friendship with a nonagenarian scriptwriter from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and a possible romance with Jack Black (giving a genuinely restrained and enjoyable performance). Workaholic Diaz is desperate to learn how to switch-off, relax, and maybe give love a chance. She finds solace in…Jude Law’s many lovely jumpers and smouldering glances. This is not a film to be described but experienced. Its camp and frothy and silly, but its also just really lovely and gets the tears going every time. If my recommendation isn’t enough, listen to my wife – watch this film over Christmas!  

2. The Muppet Christmas Carol

Kermit, a frog talks to rats dressed as Victorian children.

It’s a well-known fact that you can’t improve upon the indominable prose of Charles Dickens…WRONG! Dickens made the fatal error of not putting Muppets into his story. Rizzo and Gonzo take on the role of narrators of the story, Kermit does a sparkling turn as Bob Cratchit, and Michael Cain stars as the best on screen iteration of Scrooge (go on, fight me on this!). It’s the well-worn story brought to life by glorious songs – every year I start to sing “Tis the season to be jolly and joyous” to myself – a side-splitting script, and a clear and tender reverence for the original story and its central message. I defy anyone, child or adult, to sit through to the end this wonderful film and not want to keep Christmas in their heart every day. If you don’t like this film then I can only guess that you’ll be visited by ‘Marley and Marley, WOOOOOOOOOOA’! 

1. Love Actually

A women rubs her eye, close to tears.

Richard Curtis is my favourite director. Every film of his, however flawed (and there a several flaws in Love Actually), is so warm-hearted and good-natured that I can’t help but love them. Love Actually is Curtis firing on all cylinder: a painfully funny script, an ensemble cast of Britain’s finest talent, and a score that plays your emotions like a fiddle. A series of interconnecting love stories – love found, love lost, unrequited love, misdirected love – playing out in the run-up to Christmas, this film will not fail to put a tear in your eye and smile on your face. At times it’s a little too ‘laddy’ – I’m looking at you American sexcapade storyline – and the fact that all these people live in gorgeous houses in Wandsworth in spite of doing no discernible work is infuriating, but the fact that it is number one on this list in spirt of this is mark of just how strong a film it is. The cast list alone puts it at the top: Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Bill Nighy, Rowan Atkinson popping in for a bit…EMMA THOMPSON! The raw power of Emma Thompson quietly weeping as she listens to Joni Mitchell and contemplates the implosion of her marriage is stunning to behold. At its heart, it is a simple Richard Curtis film; it wants the viewer to relax in the beautiful spectacle of love, and to know that they are loved. I love Love Actually, and Love Actually loves me. 

EMMA THOMPSON! 

Column
Books
Culture
Music
Space
6 min read

Magnificent or mundane: how do you react to the overview effect?

Creators of a book, an album and a game, can’t agree.
A small white space capsule orbits around the earth.
A SpaceX Dragon capsule orbits above Earth.
NASA.

As I write this, two Nasa astronauts – Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore (possibly the most USA-sounding name imaginable) – are preparing to leave the International Space Station to return to Earth. They were supposed to stay on the space station for eight days, but a technical problem with their spacecraft meant they’ve been stranded in space for nine months.  

Nine. Months.  

It sounds like the premise for a horror film. Two stranded astronauts slowly descend into madness as they become increasingly isolated and cut off from humanity. Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, probably. 

That’s a lot of time to be stuck orbiting Earth, gazing at the pale blue dot, contemplating our little corner of the universe. There’s a phenomenon called the overview effect: a shift in thinking astronauts go through when they see Earth from space. Putting the planet into the wider context of the entire cosmos leads observers to rethink humanity’s place in the universe, and what it means to be human.  I imagine Suni and Butch have had quite a bit of time to do just that in recent months.  

And the overview effect is currently having a bit of a moment in wider culture, too.  

If you went into any bookshop in the weeks before Christmas, you likely saw stacks of Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital. It tells the story – although there’s not much by way of traditional ‘story’ in Orbital – of six astronauts on the International Space Station, pondering the nature of humanity from their lofty vantage point. 

Having won the booker prize, booksellers were keen to encourage readers to buy Oribtal. Praised by the Booker Prize judges for its “beauty and ambition”, I was looking forward to reading it, when I could. (And, let’s be honest, it’s a short book, which probably helped sales. Who has the time to read Ulysses or Infinite Jest in between school runs and weekly shops?) 

When I finally read it in January, I was left disappointed. I found a surprising lack of humanity in Orbital. With the exception of one astronaut – who spends her time mourning her recently deceased mother some 250 miles up in the sky – the characters feel somewhat paper thin; barely human. As the story meanders from person to person, never really settling on one character long enough to really develop them, it feels a bit … insubstantial?  

Maybe it’s a victim of its own hype. Maybe the not-quite-humanness of the astronauts and the listless quality of the narrative are intentional, designed to capture the ungrounded nature of life in space in both form and content. Maybe that’s being generous. Either way, I was left closing the book and shrugging my shoulders. If Orbital was supposed to offer a glimpse into that overview effect, it left me nonplussed. 

By coincidence, Steven Wilson has just released his eighth solo album: The Overview. Who is Steven Wilson, you ask? Only “probably the most successful British artist you've never heard of” according to The Daily Telegraph. With Wilson’s album currently sitting at #1 in the UK album charts, it doesn’t seem an unwarranted title.  

In The Overview, Wilson explores the overview effect across just two lengthy pieces of music. In the first, Wilson contrasts the mundanities of life on Earth with the chaos of space, calling us to attend to miracle that is humanity, thanks to lyrics written by the annoyingly talented Andy Partridge of XTC: 

“And there in an ordinary street  

A car isn't where it would normally be  

The driver in tears, about his payment arrears 

 Still, nobody hears whеn a sun disappears in a galaxy afar.” 

With Partridge’s help, Wilson manages to capture that humanity so sorely lacking in Orbital. Amid a sea of seemingly barren space, there is life here on this small, pokey planet, and the dramas and stresses of a man fretting about his debts don’t seem out of place, even when compared to the implosion of a star on the other side of the universe.  

All this makes a recent interview with Wilson all the more odd.  

When speaking about the overview effect, Wilson says “Your life is futile, it’s meaningless – and isn’t that a wonderful thing?” before doubling down: “And I do mean that. We spend so much of our time anxious, stressed, worried about things that sometimes we just need an injection of perspective.” 

For Wilson, this perspective – this overview effect – is liberating. It allows to stop navel-gazing, to pick our heads up and to realise our freedom to do whatever we want. After all, everything’s just matter in varying different arrangements:  

“The clouds have no history 

And the sea feels no sorrow 

The oxygen recycled 

And the atoms are just borrowed,”  

At the climax of the album’s second epic, Wilson sings – with more glee than it warrants –  

“There's no reason for anything  

 Just a beautiful infinity 

 No design and no onе at the wheel.” 

 Cheery stuff. 

It's easy to see why, in the same interview, Wilson rails against the concept of religion: “Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo … To even understand even the very simplest, most basic facts about space, should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion of God. But apparently it doesn’t.” 

It all sounds a bit like an angsty teenager encountering the New Atheists for the first time. And this edge to Wilson’s work jars uncomfortably with the humanitarian streak that runs through his music. Wilson wants (rightly) to celebrate the mundane, the ordinary, and the human. And simultaneously wants to tell us that we’re just … stuff. Just atoms arranged in one way or another. Wilson pays lip-service to the humanity missing from Orbital, but it’s superficial.  

And all this reminds me of my favourite video game ever: 2019’s The Outer Wilds. (Not to be confused with 2019’s also-space-based-but-decidedly-mediocre The Outer Worlds). In The Outer Wilds, you play as an alien with a ramshackle spaceship who sets off to explore their solar system. Except every 22 minutes, the sun explodes. When it does, you wake up on your home planet and start again. 

You use these 22-minute loops to explore the solar system, flying manually from planet to planet, and exploring every nook and cranny of them in the process. You see awe-inspiring sights and are confronting with the absolute otherness and horror of the vastness of space.  

And yet. As you explore, you come across notes left by long-forgotten civilizations. Mundane lists and frustrated exchanges between colleagues. You come across life, in other words, even if you don’t meet many other actual people. I can’t say much more than this without ruining the game: The Outer Wilds depends on your real-world knowledge to progress, and so, the more I tell you, the more I ruin.  

But, suffice it to say that this is exactly what is missing from Harvey and Wilson’s work. While they both ostensibly want to remind us of the value and the miracle of humanity, both leave me feeling cold. Both leave me with the impression that life is little more than atoms arranged one way and not the other. Just stuff.  

But in The Outer Wilds, the sun’s implosion – and all that is lost with it – is a genuine heartbreak every single time. I think about all the stories I’ve read, and the people I’ve met, and how it’s all about to be lost as a bright supernova washes over me. And then I wake up again at the start of the cycle, relieved that all is not lost.  

If you can, you should play The Outer Wilds. It’s beautiful. Really, really beautiful. More so than Orbital or The Overview. Our place in the universe can be overwhelming; we’re small, and the universe is strange and scary. But we’re not just insignificant stuff. Our stories and the people we share them with matter. And Outer Wilds captures this tension impeccably. Only it captures life’s miraculous nature in the way it deserves. 

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