So it’s a surprise and a delight to see a UK release for this deft, moving tale of sisterhood across multiple decades, which most impressively traces and braids the life stories of five women in under 90 minutes, its melodrama never feeling forced or compressed. Playwright-turned-film-maker Emma Dante’s charming, lace-delicate second film premiered in competition at this year’s Venice film festival, where it was overshadowed by beefier competition. Initially announcing its intent to satirise empty celebrity activism, it proceeds to fall into exactly that trap itself, with wet self-help songs, preening star performances from James Corden and Meryl Streep, and a forced air of sub- Glee gaiety – undercut by the film’s palpable confidence that it’s Really Helping People. Adapted from a modest Broadway musical, this glitter-assaulted trifle centres on a vain quartet of New York stage luvvies, descending on a bigoted Indiana town to help a marginalised lesbian teen attend prom. The latest product of Ryan Murphy’s relentless Netflix content deal is also the first feature film he’s directed since 2010’s Eat Pray Lov e, and proves he has a better head for episodic TV. Meryl Streep and James Corden in The Prom. It’s also free to view on YouTube, thanks to the National Film Board of Canada’s marvellous archival channel. If that sounds solemn, it is, but there’s hard-won humanity amid the austerity, and Jutra has an eye for crisp, severe beauty. ![]() Made in 1971, Claude Jutra’s film is an unsentimental coming-of-age tale, following a Quebecer teen through about the least jolly Christmas Eve imaginable, as he assists his undertaker uncle in the collection and eventual rescue of a dead body. Or exquisite misery, if you feel like plunging into the anti-Christmas genre at its most extreme with Mon Oncle Antoine – a Canadian classic that I hadn’t seen until recently. ![]() With that in mind, the usual seasonal viewing options – those extravagant Christmas films that pile on the tinselly cheer – may feel out of step with the collective mood.Ī time, then, for Christmas films that permit a little wintry chill, some room for loneliness or pensive melancholy. E ven in a year that has made us numb to strangeness, it’s been a funny old December: a festive season largely without festivities, while many will be spending Christmas apart from their usual crowd.
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