Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming, and in this week’s special edition: the most underrated holiday (or holiday-ish) movies.
What to watch in 2023: The best movies (so far)
The Night Before (Netflix)
With its gallons of booze, David Mamet levels of profanity and enough pot to kill all eight of Santa’s reindeer, The Night Before aimed to lodge itself into the well-established adult holiday comedy genre when it was released in 2015. You know the one: it’s that comfy corner of the market where filmmakers freely mix vulgarity with sentimentality, vices with Vixen (see A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, Bad Santa, Friday After Next etc.). In that regard, director Jonathan Levine’s Hanukkah-timed comedy succeeds handily: The film is a near-perfect mesh of raunch and that-time-of-the-year sincerity – a warm hug with your drunk uncle. The result is a finely tuned comedy machine, a film that not only works as a standalone contemporary project, but one that will come to be viewed in five, 10, 15 years as a snapshot of industry players (Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, even a little role for Nathan Fielder) at their prime.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Crave)
Any Shane Black film would have fit the bill here, as each of his dude-heavy action-comedies takes place during Christmas (including Iron Man 3, The Nice Guys and his scripts for The Last Boy Scout and Lethal Weapon). But it’s this 2005 noir-comedy that makes the perfect Christmas gift – and not only because the movie resurrected Robert Downey Jr.’s career, paving the way for his Tony Stark payday. A holiday-set detective story in which the twists are as plentiful as the profanity, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a sweet-and-sour delight that will keep you guessing. Bonus: It features one of Val Kilmer’s best performances, too.
Little Women (Netflix)
Once you’re done rewatching Barbie, give Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel – the seventh to make it to the screen – another Christmas-weekend shot. Originally acclaimed for its unique chronology, and for ending on a rather meta note, the film still pops. Especially when Bob Odenkirk, as the family’s patriarch, arrives home for the holidays to deliver his immortal line, “My little women!” Merry Oden-Christmas.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Cineplex Store)
Halfway between a Christmas and a New Year’s Eve movie, but fully demented, Joe Dante’s sequel shifts from small-town America to a Trump-y Manhattan skyscraper, where adorable mogwai Gizmo has been captured by some mad scientists. You know the drill: Gizmo eventually gets wet, his spawn are fed after midnight, chaos ensues. An absurdist romp that amps up the 1984 original’s slapstick, The New Batch is essentially a live-action Looney Tunes feature. It is raucous enough to make it feel like you’re hosting your very own holiday party, and silly enough that if you pass out from too much eggnog and wake up 45 minutes later, you’ll still be able to figure out what’s going on.
Batman Returns (Crave)
If your Christmas doesn’t involve Michelle Pfeiffer outfitted in a leather suit, Danny DeVito disgustingly devouring live fish, or Michael Keaton scowling so hard at Christopher Walken that you can get a third-degree sunburn, then I will not be attending your turkey dinner. If, however, you’d like to receive all those pleasures under the tree this year, then it’s time to revisit Tim Burton’s most underrated film, a macabre Batman sequel whose seasonal trappings underscore its brazen, bizarre vision.
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