Review
Christmas culture
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5 min read

Five Christmas films to revel in

Haunting, salving, teary, side-splitting and glorious - our recommended festive films.
Muppet characters dressed as Dickensian characters stand in a snowy street.
'Dickens made the fatal error of not putting Muppets into his story.'

‘Tis the season to be jolly and watching a good film with a cup of tea and a biscuit, while the freezing wind and rain whip at the window, can be one of the jolliest things you can do this year. The genre of ‘Christmas’ has only grown and grown over the decades, so if you’re stumped by the myriad of choices – often dreadful schlock that feature the word ‘Prince’ and ‘Christmas’ in the title superimposed over a picture of two ludicrously attractive people staring lovingly into each other’s eyes in a blizzard – take comfort in my Top 5 Christmas films. 

Note – this is my top 5. My personal top 5. These are not the ‘best’ Christmas films. You will not find It’s a Wonderful Life on here. It is glorious and lovely, but I saw it too late in life, and just don’t emotionally resonate with it as much as other Christmas films. I will not apologise. You will not see Die Hard. It is indeed and iconic action film, with a superb Alan Rickman performance, and it is indeed set at a Christmas party…but that isn’t enough to make it a ‘Christmas film’. I WILL NOT APOLOGISE! 

5. The Nightmare Before Christmas 

An animated scene shows a grandmother readng a story to children on her lap in front of a fire.

I would have put this film higher up the list if not for the fact that it straddles two seasons – All Hollows and Christmas. This film is iconic, however. The stop-motion animation gives the whole affair an extra haunting air. The music is superb – I still find myself humming What’s This every few weeks. The story is unhinged (what else do you expect from Tim Burton?) but to just the right degree, and behind the ghoulish setting and mad-cap story there is a good old-fashioned moral-of-the-story for children and adults alike to enjoy. Nightmare is a marvellous reminder of what it means to have the Christmas spirit, and the great thing about it is that it’s a film you can enjoy any time from October 31st! 

4. Bad Santa

A dishevelled looking Santa, without a beard, stares to the side.

Billy Bob Thornton is mesmerising as an ‘eating, drinking, sh***ing, f***ing Santa Claus’. This is not one for the kids! Thornton’s Willie T. Soke is a professional thief who, with his dwarf assistant, get jobs as a grotto Santa and Elf in shopping malls during the festive season so as to case the place and rob it…but this time is different. Soake’s degeneracy has become a serious liability, and his instability and vulgar sexual exploits catch the attention of John Ritter’s mall manager and Bernie Mac’s security chief. Soake is spiralling out of control, but perhaps a romantic relationship with Lauren Graham’s barmaid and a chance encounter with a vulnerable young boy (to whom Soake becomes the least appropriate father-figure) might just be his salvation, and teach him the spirit of Christmas. The script is jet-black funny, and all the performances are spot on – although this is entirely Thornton’s film to shine in. Lewd, rude, and crude, but with a heart of gold (deep down under all the effing and jeffing), this film is the perfect antidote for those who find the jollity of the festive season a little twee. 

3. The Holiday

A couple, wrapped up in winter clothes, flirt with each other.

This film has Jude Law in it. This ought to be enough to commend it to you, but I’ll go further. This film has Jude Law playing a jumper-wearing widowed single-dad, who can turn the humble napkin into a delightful children’s entertainment, and who gives smouldering glances across a crowded pub. Before you all rush out to watch it, let me finish the blurb. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslett are two women, unlucky in love, who decide to swap homes for the Christmas holiday. Winslett is escaping a toxic infatuation and finds solace in a friendship with a nonagenarian scriptwriter from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and a possible romance with Jack Black (giving a genuinely restrained and enjoyable performance). Workaholic Diaz is desperate to learn how to switch-off, relax, and maybe give love a chance. She finds solace in…Jude Law’s many lovely jumpers and smouldering glances. This is not a film to be described but experienced. Its camp and frothy and silly, but its also just really lovely and gets the tears going every time. If my recommendation isn’t enough, listen to my wife – watch this film over Christmas!  

2. The Muppet Christmas Carol

Kermit, a frog talks to rats dressed as Victorian children.

It’s a well-known fact that you can’t improve upon the indominable prose of Charles Dickens…WRONG! Dickens made the fatal error of not putting Muppets into his story. Rizzo and Gonzo take on the role of narrators of the story, Kermit does a sparkling turn as Bob Cratchit, and Michael Cain stars as the best on screen iteration of Scrooge (go on, fight me on this!). It’s the well-worn story brought to life by glorious songs – every year I start to sing “Tis the season to be jolly and joyous” to myself – a side-splitting script, and a clear and tender reverence for the original story and its central message. I defy anyone, child or adult, to sit through to the end this wonderful film and not want to keep Christmas in their heart every day. If you don’t like this film then I can only guess that you’ll be visited by ‘Marley and Marley, WOOOOOOOOOOA’! 

1. Love Actually

A women rubs her eye, close to tears.

Richard Curtis is my favourite director. Every film of his, however flawed (and there a several flaws in Love Actually), is so warm-hearted and good-natured that I can’t help but love them. Love Actually is Curtis firing on all cylinder: a painfully funny script, an ensemble cast of Britain’s finest talent, and a score that plays your emotions like a fiddle. A series of interconnecting love stories – love found, love lost, unrequited love, misdirected love – playing out in the run-up to Christmas, this film will not fail to put a tear in your eye and smile on your face. At times it’s a little too ‘laddy’ – I’m looking at you American sexcapade storyline – and the fact that all these people live in gorgeous houses in Wandsworth in spite of doing no discernible work is infuriating, but the fact that it is number one on this list in spirt of this is mark of just how strong a film it is. The cast list alone puts it at the top: Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Bill Nighy, Rowan Atkinson popping in for a bit…EMMA THOMPSON! The raw power of Emma Thompson quietly weeping as she listens to Joni Mitchell and contemplates the implosion of her marriage is stunning to behold. At its heart, it is a simple Richard Curtis film; it wants the viewer to relax in the beautiful spectacle of love, and to know that they are loved. I love Love Actually, and Love Actually loves me. 

EMMA THOMPSON! 

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Culture
Film & TV
6 min read

Oppenheimer’s Tower of Babel

Overwhelmed by the cinematic experience of Oppenheimer, Daniel Kim reflects on director Christopher Nolan's powerful modern mythmaking.

Daniel Kim

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

An actor looks on as a film director stands beside him staring with his hands raised.
The modern Prometheus and the mythmaker. Cillian Murphy playing Robert Oppenheimer, stands next to director Christopher Nolan.
Universal Pictures.

The opening weekend for Oppenheimer has come and gone and the response has been almost unanimously glowing, even gushing.

And truly, the film is a technical masterpiece, demonstrating director Christopher Nolan is working at the height of his power.

The pitch-perfect performances from Cillian Murphy and the impressively star-studded cast, the transcendent yet intimate cinematography, Ludwig Görranson’s hauntingly triumphant score, and the remarkable pacing despite its three-hour runtime make for perfectly dialled-in cinema.

Some may struggle with the dialogue-heavy time-skipping narrative flow of the film, made particularly difficult by the inexplicable voice-muddying sound mix that seems to plague many of Nolan’s recent films. Despite the flaws, however, Oppenheimer is certainly one of the key cinematic moments of 2023. I don’t think I can add anything profoundly new to the gallons of electronic ink already spilt reviewing this film. 

Instead, what I can speak to is the most bizarre experience I had as the film came to a close. As the final shot of the biopic reached its climax and cut to black, I found myself suddenly and involuntarily dissolving into tears. I left the film feeling horrified yet inspired, sickened yet soaring, revelling in the triumph of an underdog technological victory as well as being confronted with the banal depravity of mankind. So much brilliance, yet so much brokenness. It invoked such a maximalist emotional response within me, that the only appropriate response my body could come up with was to weep. So… I am by no means an objective reviewer.  

Nolan’s depiction of the first nuclear test... is more like a religious epiphany rather than a run-of-the-mill movie explosion. 

To call Oppenheimer a ‘biopic’ would be like calling the book of Genesis a biography about Abraham. Nolan’s Oppenheimer takes more of the form of a Myth. ‘Myth’ not in the sense of fiction, but more in the sense that J.R.R. Tolkien or Carl Jung meant it - as a universal narrative that perfectly captures the spirit of the age. And in 2023, apocalyptic anxiety is very much in the air.  

Both Nolan and the biography that the film is adapted from - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer - don’t shy away from the mythical and religious texture inherent to the story of the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. 

Oppenheimer is Prometheus - who “stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity”. In fact, the film opens with this quote in white text over a slow-motion nuclear detonation, intertwining Oppenheimer’s life with that of the Greek Titan, Prometheus, who, having given technological fire to humankind, is chained to a tree by Zeus to have his guts eaten out by vultures for the rest of time.  

Oppenheimer is also the Hindu God, Krishna, who originally said the now infamous line, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” from the Bhagavad Gita. The phrase he utters at the first test of his invention.

He is the man who decided to name the first test after Triune Christian God - The Trinity Test. The irony is thick. The great creator God of Christianity is represented by the great destroyer of worlds - the atomic bomb. In fact, Nolan’s depiction of the first nuclear test is more like a religious epiphany rather than a run-of-the-mill movie explosion. Some viewers might be disappointed by the impressionistic and almost surreal way the Trinity test is depicted at the climax of the film. Yet, I found the moment almost mystical. The blinding light of atomic devastation is the blinding light of divine glory.  

1940s New Mexico becomes the arena for the 21st Century’s struggle against itself and its fraught relationship with technology and morality.

The film doesn’t allow you to extricate the history from the myth, the science from the mystical, or the past from the present. The film explores the particular historical knots that you would expect from a film about Oppenheimer. The equal pride and guilt of the scientists who worked on the bomb post-Hiroshima; the banality of the American military industrial complex; the post-war Soviet nuclear threat; and the enigma of the man himself. There are some very powerful scenes that explore these themes with sickening and gut-wrenching effect. Yet, Nolan is fully aware that his film is in dialogue with the contemporary existential discussions about the dangers of AI, the fear of climate and political apocalypse, and the moral implications of technological progress at all costs.  

The star-studded cast is not only hugely impressive but also has the strange effect of continually dragging the historical context of Oppenheimer right into 2023. Nolan has used his considerable clout to draw together a cast of some of the most recognisable and celebrated icons of the 21st century from Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr, and Emily Blunt to Gary Oldman, Rami Malek, and Matt Damon. Only Christopher Nolan could cast a leading man like Gary Oldman and give him 10 lines to say in a three-hour film.   

This creates a movie where the most iconic faces of our time come together to play their part in this myth. 1940s New Mexico becomes the arena for the 21st Century’s struggle against itself and its fraught relationship with technology and morality.  

In this way, Oppenheimer is more than just a cautionary tale from history. It becomes an icon of our time, in the religious sense. A manifestation of a universal story set in a particular context.   

What is three-hundred years of so-called progress, technology, and political theory culminating to? We have no idea. 

Many of us will be familiar with Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. A work of comparative mythology which describes the archetypical hero found in the world of myths - The Hero’s Journey. Campbell calls this the Monomyth - the one story which every story is about. A hero ventures forth from his common world, encounters adversity and his inner demons, wins a decisive victory against the forces of death, and returns from this adventure forever changed and with the power to bestow wisdom to his community. This is Luke Skywalker, Aladdin, and Harry Potter but it’s not Oppenheimer.  

Christopher Nolan has seemed to have stumbled upon a different monomyth with his biopic. The story of a human community earnestly seeking technological knowledge of the heavenly powers, desiring to harness it, and ultimately unleashing it upon the earth only to discover its civilisation-destroying power. It’s the monomyth of the Tower of Babel. Technology reaching to the heavens resulting in the destruction of the city. But instead of a tower of brick and mortar, Oppenheimer’s tower is a pillar of fire and nuclear ash. Things might seem like grand progress in one moment, yet in the next, it’s annihilation.  

Nolan’s decision to make Oppenheimer a biopic has the uneasy effect of intermingling the myths of The Hero’s Journey and the Tower of Babel. Oppenheimer is the protagonist who undergoes all the key beats of the Hero’s Journey. Yet it is precisely this aspirational adventure that culminates in The Tower of Babel. It’s as if the film is saying that those who have most embodied The Hero’s Journey in our Modern Age are those who have also destroyed the world. Oppenheimer is but one example in a retinue of such technological geniuses. 

There is a haunting line in the film where one of Oppenheimer’s colleagues refuses to work with him on the bomb. He says:

“I don’t want the culmination of three-hundred years of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction.”  

This is still the anxiety that typifies our technological and political moment today. The only difference is, we don’t know where we’re culminating to. Where is three-hundred years of so-called progress, technology, and political theory culminating to? We have no idea.  

Maybe this is what struck such a deep primal chord with me as the credits rolled.  

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