Shelf Christmas

08/02/2022

04/01/2022

Bruges isn’t exactly where hitman Ray (Colin Farrell) was planning to spend the holiday season, but the Belgian town is where he must stay, in the company of his older, wiser counterpart (Brendan Gleeson). The picturesque festive backdrop contrasts neatly with Ray’s bored cynicism and the increasingly splattery, sweary mayhem that spills across the fairytale setting of Martin McDonagh’s breakout hit.

04/01/2022

This festive masterpiece by German-expat genius Ernst Lubitsch about the struggles of a coterie of neurotic, underpaid, underloved department store clerks is an immaculate conflation of his sprightly shooting style, expertly layered wisecracking and bracing realism, all topped off with a romantic subplot that offers a nakedly joyous celebration of young, serendipitous love.

04/01/2022

It’s already become a Christmas classic for especially forward-thinking families. Working for the first time with material developed by another screenwriter, director Todd Haynes transforms an underappreciated 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel about secret le***an love into a universal romance. Once you’ve seen Rooney Mara in a Santa hat, there’s no turning back.

04/01/2022

Michael Caine as Scrooge, Gonzo the Great as Charles Dickens, Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit – just three of many reasons to love this witty, warm-hearted take on the immortal story. Despite the presence of Muppets, it is (believe it or not) one of the more faithful versions of the book.

04/01/2022

There’s something incredibly lovely about first-rate stop-motion work, and this gorgeous musical about a botched Halloween-Christmas merger ranks up there with the old Rankin/Bass Xmas toons. Who else but Tim Burton, the project’s patron producer, could have come up with such appealingly macabre mayhem?

04/01/2022

Hideous Christmas jumpers weren’t always considered cool like they are today. So we can’t blame our protagonist Bridget Jones’s (Renée Zellweger) less than pleasant reaction when she sees her potential love interest, Mark Darcy (a wonderfully stuffy Colin Firth), wearing a sweater with a giant reindeer face on it. It does, however, kick off this sharp romantic comedy-drama about navigating twenty-first-century dating and the pitfalls of having an affair with a caddish, dashing Hugh Grant.

04/01/2022

Nora Ephron’s remake of The Shop Around the Corner is a fairytale about warring booksellers is both a dreamy ode to New York’s Upper West Side as it is to the power of love. The melancholic Christmas scenes set to Harry Nilsson's ‘Remember’ will make you want to go out ice skating or gift a bunch of children’s books, while the chemistry between Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks transforms a cheesy into a classic.

04/01/2022

If you’re keen to learn the harsh realities of the global economy but can’t be bothered to trawl through a textbook, this comic satire should do the trick. Eddie Murphy is the streetwise hustler who switches lives with Dan Aykroyd’s preening Wall Street moneybags, only to find himself the victim of a cruel joke played by a pair of vicious aristocrats.