Maybe there’s something in the air, but I’ve noticed The Apartment being bandied about as one of the great Christmas movies this year. Photograph: Cinetext/United Artists/Allstar 5. Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine in The Apartment. Michael grabs his brother by the head, kisses him and says: “I know it was you.” The consequences of this one moment are vast so vast, in fact, that Al Pacino would go on to reference the party in his extraordinary Dunkaccino rap, which closes the Adam Sandler film Jack and Jill. During a raucous party in Cuba, Michael Corleone has the sudden realisation that his brother Fredo tried to orchestrate an assassination attempt on him. Here we have perhaps one of the most famous New Year’s Eve scenes ever committed to cinema. Has William H Macy ever been better than when he’s wandering around a house with a gun in a cuckolded daze, deciding that he would rather kill himself than live through the 1980s? Arguably not. It depicts a fully debauched porn-star party that culminates – after a discovery of marital infidelity – with a double murder and a suicide. Perhaps the best remembered NYE scene of his comes during Boogie Nights. Boogie Nights (1997)Īs we’ll see, Paul Thomas Anderson has become quite the expert when it comes to New Year’s Eve. The moment where a character plunges from a balcony into the arms of a waiting suitor never stops being terrifying. Although its climax – a dreamy, art-filled, dialogue-free 17-minute dance between Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron – is what people most remember, the New Year’s Eve sequence is also hellishly elaborate. Vincente Minnelli’s classic is less a standalone film and more the world’s first jukebox musical – a loose-fitting plot shaped around George Gershwin’s composition of the same name. Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in An American in Paris.

Fortunately for us, this is one of those deftly paced romcoms that has realistic stakes and absolutely no defrauding of handsome coma patients.

And so whatever romcom shenanigans the machinery of the genre demands, we can all rest easy in the knowledge that it will end on New Year’s Eve. Because it’s a diary, isn’t it? All diaries end on New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile, this is not only much less bonkers but actually fits the New Year’s Eve theme tremendously well. Whoops! Anyway, some of this happens on New Year’s Eve. But – uh oh! – while he was in a coma, she fell in love with his brother. He wakes up and, suffering from intense concussive amnesia, agrees to marry her. Sandra Bullock watches a stranger become horribly injured and, thanks to all manner of plot contrivances, convinces his family that she is his fiancee. While You Were Sleeping (1995)Ī movie that future historians will use to demonstrate exactly how messed up the romcom genre got in its time, While You Were Sleeping has a honker of a problematic premise. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy 10. But did you remember that the wave hits the boat on New Year’s Eve? Possibly not, but this is nevertheless definitive proof that New Year’s Eve is the worst.Ĭary Grant and Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember. You will remember that The Poseidon Adventure is a film with a glittering all-star cast, about a liner that is struck by a tidal wave and sinks in the middle of the ocean. Which isn’t something that happens in real life, I’m told. It begins on New Year’s Eve, where Domhnall Gleeson has a horrendously awkward would-be romantic encounter with a girl and subsequently learns that he can time-travel.

Richard Curtis’s time-travel romcom appears to be enjoying something of a critical resurgence at the moment. It’s on YouTube (above) if you can’t stomach the whole thing. Nevertheless, on New Year’s Eve, Fred Astaire and Marjorie Reynolds perform an incredibly drunk showstopper of a dance. Holiday Inn is a film about an entertainment venue that opens only on national holidays many are those who thought it was a Christmas movie and then had to suffer through the now fairly offensive Lincoln’s birthday segment.

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