For those not going out to celebrate, you can still party with Harry and Sally, play cards with Jack Lemmon and make merry hell at the Overlook Hotel
At the end of any especially troublesome year it’s always good to revisit The Apartment, Billy Wilder’s brilliantly bleak comedy of office politics and festive bad cheer. It memorably ends on the stroke of midnight as heartsick Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) abandons a drunken new year’s party to be with hapless, jobless CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) instead. Is The Apartment suggesting that Kubelik and Baxter then live happily ever after? Probably not, because I’ve never been convinced that these two lovers are going to stay the course. They’re too mismatched and desperate; their wounds are still too fresh. What the ending gives us is the next best thing: a sudden sense of hope and freedom, with everything packed in boxes except for a bottle, two glasses and a deck of cards. Nothing to lose and nowhere to go. “Shut up and deal.” A clean break, a fresh start. Xan Brooks
A flop on release – at a time audiences were facing an abundance of multiplex options – Kathryn Bigelow’s pre-millennial tech-noir has seen its reputation swell substantially over the decades. James Cameron and Jay Cocks’s screenplay straddles the 20th and 21st centuries: kick-ass chauffeur Angela Bassett strives to shake lovelorn VR addict Ralph Fiennes from his funk so as to unravel a conspiracy involving the LAPD. What follows is a cautionary tale about real-world structural flaws and the bedazzlements of the virtual realm; the source of Fatboy Slim’s “right here, right now” sample; and, most crucially, a propulsive, jolting, finally exhilarating thriller. Increasingly, when the clock strikes midnight on 1 January, it’s Bassett’s wearied “we made it” that sounds like a bell in my head. Mike McCahill
