Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI IMAX
Thirteen years has given you plenty of time to decide how excited you are about a return trip to Pandora. Perhaps some of the global hysteria around James Cameron’s original Avatar (2009) has receded in that time; audiences shrinking from their initial ardour, just as happened with Cameron’s Titanic (1997). Yet this bounteous, state-of-the-art fantasy sequel has the passion and the spectacle to make it happen again. In 3D, running in excess of three hours and with a budget of more than $350 million, Avatar: The Way of Water asks for another leap of faith from the viewer as it joins Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his Na’vi family as they flee human colonisers to hide out on a remote reef.
The War Trilogy: Three Films by Andrzej Wajda (1954 to 1958)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
One of the canonical trilogies in world cinema, the three Second World War films that announced the arrival of Polish director Andrzej Wajda have been released as a handsome Blu-ray box by Second Run DVD. They are stories of resistance, desperation and moral conflict set in Nazi-occupied Poland or in the immediate aftermath of the war. A Generation (1955) was Wajda’s striking debut. The middle film, Kanal (1957), sees a band of resistance fighters hiding out in the Warsaw sewers. And the final film, Ashes and Diamonds (1958), sees ‘Polish James Dean’ Zbigniew Cybulski playing an assassin ordered to kill a former ally.
City Lights (1931)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Four years after the advent of talking pictures, Charlie Chaplin continued to hold out against the tide of sound. And to no detriment: 1931’s City Lights might be his most highly regarded feature even now, coming 36th in the recent Sight and Sound poll (down from number two in the first poll in 1952). It’s the one in which Chaplin’s famous Tramp character falls in love with a blind flower seller (Virginia Serrill), who mistakes him for a rich benefactor. It’s also the one with the famous scene in the boxing ring, with the Tramp as an accidental participant. Unabashedly sentimental, its peerless blend of laughs and tears makes it perfect festive viewing.
The Firm (1993)
Where’s it on? Channel 4, Saturday, 11.30pm
The first (and one of the best) of the 90s wave of John Grisham legal thrillers. Tom Cruise plays the Harvard Law School graduate who is showered with perks after taking a job at a prestigious Memphis law firm, but soon discovers there’s a sinister side to their operation. At 154 minutes, Sydney Pollack’s adaptation is quite the wallow – glossy, paranoid, compulsively watchable and with a cast of great 90s faces including Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, Gene Hackman and David Strathairn. Dave Grusin’s jaunty, Oscar-nominated jazz piano score brings an extra layer of class.
The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar (1921)
Where’s it on? Netflix
Take note: the treasure trove of Swedish Film Archive restorations lurking on Netflix is leaving the service at the end of the year. Among the casualties are classic silent films by Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller and Carl Dreyer, made in the 1910s and 20s when Scandinavia was at the vanguard of expressive cinema. A less well-known title is this 1921 story of a mother taking her bereaved son on a pilgrimage to try to cure his broken heart. Flashbacks fill in the details of his doomed romance before a miraculous ending brings both haunting use of double exposure and a bittersweet twist that’s pitched halfway between Ordet (1955) and TV’s The Twilight Zone.
