Still trying to figure out a last-minute gift for the ’80s-obsessed superhero in your life? Make some cocoa and watch “The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special,” in which Mantis and Drax are in the same boat/spaceship. ( HBO Max) - Glenn Whipp ‘The Fabulous Baron Munchausen’ Just pour a little bourbon in your eggnog, sit back and enjoy. You’d have to be a Scrooge to suggest that none of this happened quite the way it’s depicted. “Santa Claus is bringing you a lawsuit!” a square sponsor bellows to Parker. He dons black leather, grabs a guitar and growls the opening lines of “Heartbreak Hotel,” the beginning of a glorious rebirth that gets great comic mileage out of the colonel’s dismay. Tom Parker seeing what might be the ugliest Christmas sweater ever and proclaiming, “We are going to sing three spectacular Christmas songs in … that … very … sweater.” The King wasn’t having it. Or, if you simply want to enjoy a cup of Yuletide cheer, you can zero in on the making of Elvis’ ’68 Comeback Special, which begins at the 77-minute mark with Tom Hanks’ Col. You can, of course, watch Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” in its entirety, reveling in Austin Butler’s hunka-hunka title turn and the bombastic Baz-ness of it all. Rating PG-13, for substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking. ( Prime Video Paramount+) - Michael Ordoña ‘Elvis’ Most of all, the romance between two sympathetic leads feels earned. Bode and lushly scored by the late, great Angelo Badalamenti. But where “Cousin, Cousine” (1975) plays as a bitter tale of revenge, “Cousins” is about the giddy, heady spiral of falling in love. To get back at them, the nice ones pretend to have an affair - you can guess where this leads. Both films involve nice people who’ve just become cousins by marriage and are stuck with awful, unfaithful mates. We speak, of course, of “Cousins,” the beautiful 1989 romantic comedy with a crack cast topped by Ted Danson at his charmingest, Isabella Rossellini at her beguilingest and Lloyd Bridges at his go-get-’em-Granddaddest. This is your irregularly scheduled reminder that Joel Schumacher made a really good movie that was not only a remake of an acclaimed French film, but much better than the original. ( Multiple platforms, including the Criterion Channel) - Justin Chang ‘Cousins’ This is a feast of a picture, layered with stories within stories and unspooled with startling visual invention (the puppet-show prologue alone is worth a rental), and magnificently acted by an ensemble that includes Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Melvil Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni and Emmanuelle Devos. For the Vuillard clan, conflict isn’t just a temporary condition en route to a feel-good carols-and-mistletoe climax it’s a natural state of being for characters who are thrillingly alive and thrillingly human in ways movies seldom bother to show. But “A Christmas Tale,” Arnaud Desplechin’s rich and dizzyingly prismatic 2008 masterpiece about a sensationally stormy French family, inspires emotions far more complicated than either recognition or relief. ( Hulu) - Matt Brennanĭysfunctional-family movies can be a mixed blessing of the season at best they can help you feel a little better about your own fractious holiday gatherings, and at worst they might play like the opposite of escapist entertainment. If you want to get me a stocking stuffer, consider a pinup calendar of all the beautiful men in those delicious period clothes. What he delivers instead is one of the cinema’s most richly textured depictions of queer life avant la lettre and, for my money, the finest film of the year. Indeed, as played in his youth by the sublime Jack Lowden, and framed by the gruff reminiscences of the older, married, Catholic Sassoon (Peter Capaldi), his contradictions add up to a sort of anti-biopic, impressionistic and fragmentary: To impose a throughline on the country dandy turned decorated military officer turned homosexual gadabout turned religious conservative with wife and kid is, Davies intuits, both folly and fallacy. In this extraordinary life of Siegfried Sassoon, who was committed for “shell shock” in 1917 after publicly opposing World War I, the venomous satirist of “They” emerges as an even more ambivalent figure than the self-portrait conjured up in his George Sherston trilogy of autobiographical novels. The English war poets were my first love, literarily, so it is an intense thrill seeing that generation’s catastrophic sensitivities filtered through filmmaker Terence Davies’ melodramatic own. Rating: PG-13, for disturbing war images, some sexual material and thematic elements. (Laurence Cendrowicz / Roadside Attractions)
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