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Batman & Robin

1. Batman & Robin (Joel Schumacher, 1997)
Although references to the Holiday Season in ‘Batman & Robin’ are fleeting at best, the film totally embodies that callously measured annual capitalist jackboot to the teeth of some lesser, nobler enterprise that no-doubt intends to use its precious screen-time to unlace the subtle mysteries of the human soul instead of considering the best ways to flog crap to children. Sounding like it was co-written by an assistant in Woolworths' toy department, every line in Joel Schumacher’s soulless film feels like it could emanate from the mouth of some string-activated talking action figure. The neon-lit art deco Gotham skylines shoot for Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’, but just about outshines Blackpool in low season, and a stinky central performance from George Clooney as the Dark Knight is so unthreatening they may as well have sprayed the corpse of Bing Crosby with black latex and replaced the Batmobile with a crate of tinsel-wrapped Advocaat.

2. ‘Tis The Season (Forbes Grimes, 1957)
When Tony Randall can't get home for Christmas, doting wife Doris Day decides to bring it to his office, unaware that her philandering spouse had intended to spend the holidays working on Pauline from accounts in this bizarre Yuletide inversion of fireside family values. Meanwhile, bad weather forces the firm’s crotchety old CEO Sir Denis (Featherington Bell) to land on the building’s helipad, the company lush, Bones (Danny Kaye), emerges from the mail room after a seventy-two-hour gin bender and Tony's brother is on his way from Sing Sing. It’s all vaguely screwball until one of Randall’s unsupervised children falls to his death down an elevator shaft and the tone subtly shifts. The recriminations begin, the turkey is burned to a crisp, they run out of liquor and nobody can find the exit – cue reminder that you can take Christmas out of the traditional, but you can never take the tradition out of Christmas.

Bell, Book and Candle

3. Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958)
Christmas in New York provides the setting for an update on the Ondine myth, dropping the Christian shtick for witchcraft, beat poetry and a maniacal, bongo-playing Jack Lemon. As a publishing hot-shot in the last weeks of bachelorhood, James Stewart is too genial to cut it as the lady-killer he’s made out to be but that doesn’t stop his new Greenwich Village neighbour, the knock-out antique dealer (and witch) Kim Novak, falling head over heels for his drawl and stutter. Having bewitched Jimmy into ditching his fiancée Novak finds herself having to choose between immortality and magic and a mortal lifetime of Stewpot love and remaindered books. Touching, yes, but this movie is really about the heady aroma of pot and beret-wearing rebellion wafting out of Greenwich Village. As a seasonal rom-com, metaphor, and document of the birth of beat, this is a minor classic.

4. The Heroes of Telemark (Anthony Mann, 1965)
Richard Harris, Kirk Douglas and Michael Redgrave engage in wartime derring-do and a lot of cross-country skiing to scupper Germany’s atom bomb programme which has been hidden up a Norwegian fjord. Harris and Douglas provide the mountain-guerilla buddy strand as they cabin-up with Ulla Jacobsson for some Yuletide bomb-making. Mann’s Panavision sweeps of the landscape make up for a glaring lack of characterisation, and the finale on a doomed ferry packed with school children, puppies and dynamite ratchets up the tension to a mild torpor. It’s interesting to note that on the real-life mission the Heroes only met with the night security guard who, naturally, couldn’t give a toss, blew-up their target without firing a single shot, then repaired to their mountain lair where they celebrated by eating some biscuits. Fact.

The Poseidon Adventure

5. The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972)
An ensemble of cheapskate bargain hunters posing as classy cruise passengers find their holiday season turned upside down as a tidal wave capsizes the Poseidon, a Golden Age cruise liner enjoying her final voyage to the scrapyard. New Year's Eve duly ruined, the survivors head for the upturned hull where there is located (unwisely, budding naval engineers might think) a hatch that can be opened from the inside. Besides big- (but not big enough) hearted Shelley Winters as an ageing champion swimmer, there’s a middlebrow sacred/profane battle between Gene Hackman’s firebrand preacher and Ernest Borgnine as a vice cop burning with a secret shame. Representing the working stiffs is Roddy MacDowel's Acres, the sole surviving waiter doomed to be par-boiled in the Poseidon’s surprisingly accessible funnel.

6. Jaws: The Revenge (Joseph Sargent, 1987)
After the July 4, Thanksgiving and Hanukkah settings of the first three 'Jaws' films, it was always on the cards that the fourth instalment would continue its run of marking public holidays by taking place at Christmas…in the Bahamas, of course. When a distant relative of Spielberg’s original shark takes a lump out of one of her endless stream of disposable children, Ellen Brody gathers up her flock and flees for Crimbo on Michael Caine’s rusty tug in the Caribbean. The great white bastard just isn’t going let it lie, though. Utilising some form of sea-to-air sonar unknown to marine biologists, the vengeful shark – which, fittingly, looks like it fell out of a Christmas cracker – follows the Brodys’ plane to the Bahamas where it eats everything up to and including Caine’s gleaming signet ring, leaving only the Christmas pud floating amongst the jetsam. You can never find room for it, can you?

Eyes Wide Shut

7. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
Stanley Kubrick’s last roll of the dice is a mad bongo flick that sends Tom Cruise on a Christmas Eve jaunt around Pinewood’s feeblest approximation of Manhattan when his wife (Nicole Kidman) drops the sex-bomb that other blokes occasionally give her the horn. Cruise spectacularly fails to pull the trigger during an increasingly unlikely series of encounters with hookers, nymphos and Alan Cumming before stumbling across a hugely decadent masked orgy in a country mansion where he still can’t close the deal, even when it is, quite literally, put on a plate for him... That Kubrick – a notorious hermit – thought a confused man wandering around on the holiday season was a subject worth exploring suggests he may have been cooped up a little too long.

8. Mr Destiny (1990, James Orr)
Putting the ‘dick’ firmly back into Dickensian, Jim Belushi 'stars' in rehash of the traditional Christmas 'what if?' plotline. After corpulent salaryman Larry J. Burrows drunkenly stacks his town car he wanders into a bar and starts gabbing to the barkeep (Michael Caine) about how meaningless his life is, and how it would all have been different if he’d just made that winning home run back in Little League. The magical barkeep (oh, did I not mention that?) decides to whisk him off to an alternate reality where he has a swimming pool full of silver dollars and is married to the boss’s buxom daughter. Of course the next thing he knows, Larry's down Wal-Mart with his freakish spawn spending his betting allowance on Transformazoid dolls, then coming home to a burnt steak dinner and a ritual beating from his trophy wife. Larry soon arrives at the festive, but distinctly un-American, moral denouement that money isn’t everything – a notion that the producers of this film also had to confront.

9. The Ref (Ted Demme, 1994)
For reasons that would make you weep salty egg-nog, Leary’s sleazy cat-burglar Gus is forced to hold bickering yuppie nightmare couple Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis hostage in their own home over the festive season. Soon realising that not even the Shankhill Butchers could adequately mediate between this pair of bile-spewing hate mongrels, Leary sets about getting whacked-out on brandy-butter speedballs before picking off the houseguests and bleating out a boorish version of ‘As She Moved Through The Fair’. Den hams it up like an overripe Judas in this Gethsemane of conspicuous consumerism. His betrayal, of course, is also ours, and it is clear from the off that Kevin and Judy will have to die on the cross of supply-side economics for all our sins.

10. A Junky’s Christmas (Nick Donkin & Melodie McDaniel, 1993)
Well, we had to stick at least one decent film on the list, so here it is, a heart-warming tale of a ex-con junkie looking to get his hands on some heroin. Who’d have thunk that the hardboiled smack rantings of William S. Burroughs would have gelled so perfectly with an exquisitely wrought stop-motion Christmas special? Well, believe it or not, they do. The story, narrated by Burroughs who himself sounds like he’s in the latter stages of cold turkey, centres on Danny the Car Wiper, a gargoyle-like claymation huckster who spends Christmas roaming around New York wondering how to get some dope. He decides to make an unscheduled house-call to a local doctor who decides to help out, only for Danny – in the spirit of Christmas – to pass on his hit to a kid with kidney stones. Aww. Brilliantly animated, brilliantly written, brilliantly narrated. In a word, brilliant.

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