Naturally, you will have promised yourself to see more films with Cinema Paradiso over the next 12 months. But to help you keep your resolutions for 2020, here is a splendidly diverse selection of features about seeing in the New Year.
While there are dozens of pictures from all periods in screen history touching upon Christmas, film-makers seem to have been less inspired by exploring what John and Yoko dubbed 'another year over and a new one just begun'. When they do seize the symbolism of letting their characters make a fresh start and put the past behind them, however, directors tend to do so in single scenes or sequences rather than entire movies.
Smiles of a New Year Night
Few people feel bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on the first day of a new year, so we'll ease you in gently with a clutch of comedies to make the world seem a better place in the cold light of day. Why not spare a thought for the Little Tramp in Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925), as he has been stood up on New Year's Eve in the bleak Klondike midwinter by dance hall hostess Georgia Hale and consoles himself by performing a soft shoe shuffle with two bread rolls on the end of some dinner forks. Seven decades later, Johnny Depp borrowed this bewitching bit of business to amuse Mary Stuart Masterson and Aidan Quinn in the diner sequence in Jeremiah S. Chechik's Benny and Joon (1993).
The metalware in question is no less than Excalibur in Wolfgang Reitherman's The Sword in the Stone (1963) and young Wart unwittingly plucks it from its resting place during a New Year tournament in Disney's engaging adaptation of the first novel in TH White's tetralogy, The Once and Future King. Among the other animations with a New Year connection is Gary Katona's Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year (2002), another Disney excursion to Hundred Acre Wood that centres around Rabbit's plan to host a party.
Four consecutive New Year's Eves take the characters from 1964 to 1967 in Bill L. Norton's More American Graffiti (1979), a follow-up to George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973) that uses a variety of film styles to convey the social changes that the country was experiencing in the years immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Although similarly trading in nostalgia, Barry Levinson's Diner (1982) opts for a narrower time frame, as the action all takes place during the last week of 1959. For many, however, the key issue is how bride-to-be Sharon Ziman will do on the 140-question quiz that fiancé Steve Guttenberg has set on his favourite football team, the Baltimore Colts, as their New Year wedding depends on her performance.
While Hollywood was producing such wholesome paeans to yesteryear and harmless updatings of the 'putting on a show' formula like Allen Arkush's Get Crazy, British pictures aimed at younger audiences had a bit more attitude, as is the case with Terry Winsor's Party Party. A North-West London spin on the John Hughes teenpic, this riotous romp centres on the New Year bash that Perry Fenwick is planning to throw with buddies Daniel Peacock and Karl Howman while his parents are at a church function. The soundtrack album became a cult collector's item, as did the limited edition LP sold off the back of John Landis's Trading Places (all 1983), which contains a crucial scene set on New Year's Eve that sees disgraced executive Dan Aykroyd and panhandler Eddie Murphy attempt to turn the tables on wagering broker brothers Dan Ameche and Ralph Bellamy by enlisting the help of a gorilla aboard an express train to prevent go-between Paul Gleason from delivering a report that will help the grasping siblings corner the market in frozen orange juice.
Woody Allen has twice used New Year's Eve to wrap up his trademark comedies. Diane Keaton cameos to croon 'You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To' at the start of 1943 in the enduringly delightful Radio Days (1987), while erstwhile lovers Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart become lost in their thoughts on hearing the chimes on opposite sides of America at the conclusion of Allen's 47th feature, Café Society (2016), an evocation of 1930s Hollywood that saw him use a digital camera for the first time.
With the spirit of Vigo the Carpathian on the rampage and slime levels threatening to engulf New York City, who you gonna call? Obviously, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), who emerge from jail in time to rescue the Statue of Liberty with a blast of Jackie Wilson's 'Higher and Higher' and a rousing citizens' chorus of 'Auld Lang Syne' in Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters II (1989). Things also get pretty raucous as the year turns in Richard Benjamin's Mermaids (1990), as Cher turns down Bob Hoskins's proposal at a New Year party and Winona Ryder gets so peeved at her mother kissing dreamboat Michael Schoeffling that she gets drunk and is cavorting with him in the church bell tower without realising that tipsy younger sister Christina Ricci has fallen into the river.
Sophistication is the byword of the New Year house party that Stephen Fry organises for his old Cambridge pals in Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends (1992). However, things go awry, as 10 years and a lot of alcohol expose the fissures between the old gang comprised of lonely publisher Emma Thompson; screenwriter Branagh and his American wife, Rita Rudner; married jingle writers Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton; and costume designer Alphonsia Emmanuel and her oikish boyfriend Tony Slattery. The denouement is markedly more dramatic in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), however, as 1959 begins with Tim Robbins plunging off the roof of Paul Newman's New York skyscraper because of a hula hoop furore, only for clock keeper Bill Cobbs to stop time so that an angelic Charles Durning can impart some good news that changes Robbins's life for the better.
The Hotel Mon Signor on New Year's Eve provides the setting for the vignettes linked by bellhop Tim Roth and directed by Allison Anders, Alexander Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino in Four Rooms (1995). Elvis Costello makes a guest appearance, while Paul Weller recorded a special cover of Tim Hardin's 'Reason to Believe' for Suri Krishnamma's dramedy, New Year's Day (2000), which was scripted by actor Ralph Brown and is full of familiar British faces supporting teenagers Andrew Lee Potts and Bobby Barry as they debate whether to carry out their suicide pact.
An altogether rosier picture of life in the UK is provided in Chris and Paul Weitz's adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel, About a Boy (2002), which sees pop composer Hugh Grant meet single mother Rachel Weisz at a New Year party and let her think that he is the father of an infant son who lives with his mum. A similarly mendacious scenario develops in Brian Levant's Are We There Yet? (2005), as kid-phobic bachelor Ice Cube hope to impress Nia Long by agreeing to get Aleisha Allen and Philip Daniel Bolden to Vancouver to spend New Year with their mother.
We flashback from the roof of Toppers' House in Nick Hornby's black comedy, A Long Way Down (both 2014), to learn what brought disgraced TV presenter Pierce Brosnan, lonely housewife Toni Collette, failed musician Aaron Paul and politician's daughter Imogen Poots to the brink of despair.
Love Is All Around
Where better to start a round-up of New Year romcoms than with a bona fide classic like George Cukor's Holiday (1938), which includes a lengthy sequence in which Cary Grant slips away from his engagement party to Doris Nolan in a cavernous Park Avenue mansion to join her siblings, Katharine Hepburn and Lew Ayres, in the playroom to get some perspective on his increasingly complicated situation? Ginger Rogers also finds things spiralling out of control In Garson Kanin's Bachelor Mother (1939), after she takes a Christmas job at Charles Coburn's New York department store and is mistaken for an unwed mother by his son, David Niven, after she finds a baby on the steps of an orphanage. As the year draws to a close, Niven asks Rogers to be his date at a New York party and he realises the depth of his feelings for her.
It's somewhat surprising that no Hollywood tunesmith set their mind to musicalising Mitchell Leisen's Preston Sturges-scripted Remember the Night (1940), which sees District Attorney Fred MacMurray take pity on shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck and invites her home for the holidays. After they kiss at a New Year barn dance, however, his mother, Beulah Bondi, asks Stanwyck to give him up to protect his reputation. Another end-of-year dance stirs up the emotions in Mark Sandrich's Holiday Inn (1942), as Fred Astaire cuts a drunken rug with Marjorie Reynolds at the club he runs with buddy Bing Crosby, only to have no memory of his actions when he wakes with a thick head the next day.
Having discovered that boss Fred MacMurray is a serial philanderer, elevator operator Shirley Maclaine is in no mood for going out by the end of Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning gem, The Apartment (1960). Consequently, she prefers to spend New Year's Eve with MacMurray's feckless underling, Jack Lemmon, even though his digs have been the scene of her illicit trysts. So, when he confesses his feelings over a game of gin rummy. she orders him to 'Shut up and deal.' Longtime friends Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan might have wished that they had spent the night playing cards rather than tumbling into bed after a New Year supper with pals Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby ends in tears. However, as fans of Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally... (1989) will already know, everything works out on the same night the following year, when Crystal ends a soul-searching walk around New York by bumping into Ryan as she leaves a party.
New Year's Eve proves less crucial for Ryan's character in Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle (1993) than it does for Tom Hanks's lonely widower. While Ryan is at a function with fiancé Bill Pullman, he is home alone being visited by the spirit of his late wife, Carey Lowell. Pullman is the one with conflicted feelings in Jon Turtletaub's While You Were Sleeping (1995), however, as while he is pleased when brother Peter Gallagher comes out of his coma on New Year's Day, he realises that his relationship with Sandra Bullock (who has been mistaken for Gallagher's fiancée) is going to have to change. Renée Zellweger also makes a resolution after overhearing Colin Firth describing her as a desperate spinster who dresses like her mother at the New Year party in Sharon Maguire's hit adaptation of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (2001).
Laura Zigman's novel provides the inspiration for Tony Goldwyn's Animal Attraction (aka Someone Like You, 2001), which sees talk show producer Hugh Jackman and production assistant Ashley Judd miss their midnight rendezvous at the New Year party at which Judd was supposed to be meeting rival producer Greg Kinnear, who has been cheating on her with the show's host, Ellen Barkin. Newly arrived in Los Angeles after a year of endless disasters, Scoot McNairy allows himself to be goaded into placing an ad on Craigslist for the perfect New Year date and is convinced his luck has taken another dip when the opinionated Sara Simmonds shows up in Alex Holdridge's indie crowdpleaser, In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2008).
Everyone in America tunes in to watch the ball drop down the flagpole on the roof of One Times Square and Garry Marshall makes the tradition the centre of his multi-storied ensemble piece, New Year's Eve (2011), which completed a holiday trilogy that began with Valentine's Day (2010) and Mother's Day (2016). Among the many characters trying to make it through the last day of December are ball drop organiser Hilary Swank, stressed mom Sarah Jessica Parker, record company secretary Michelle Pfeiffer, deliveryman Zac Efron, competing mums-to-be Sarah Paulson and Jessica Biel, electrician Héctor Elizondo, comic-book illustrator Ashton Kutcher, aspiring singer Lea Michele, and cancer patient Robert De Niro, who is being nursed through his final hours by Halle Berry and Alyssa Milano.
Days of Destiny
The ending of one year and the beginning of another is too convenient a plot device for some screenwriters to resist and several dramas made in Hollywood's heyday included sequences set around New Year.
Reporter Cary Grant gatecrashes a New Year party to propose to record shop clerk Irene Dunne before he heads off to Japan for three months at the start of George Stevens's tear-jerking melodrama Penny Serenade (1941), and they spend their first night as newlyweds in his train compartment. Joseph Cotten and Ginger Rogers meet for the first time during a rail journey in William Dieterle's I'll Be Seeing You (1944), although he says nothing about his shell shock and she keeps quiet about her conviction for involuntary manslaughter. They are drawn together over the holidays in Pinehill and Cotten invites Rogers and her family to the New Year party at the YMCA. But she is too ashamed of her past to listen to his hopes for their future and they part company as the new day dawns.
Unwilling to tie herself down to one man. Ann Todd also rejects Trevor Howard's advances in David Lean's adaptation of HG Wells's The Passionate Friends (1949). Yet, when they meet at a New Year function nine years later, she is married to wealthy banker Claude Rains. This chic assembly can't hold a candle to the black-and-white ball staged by the art students in Vincente Minnelli's Oscar-winning rendition of George Gershwin's An American in Paris (1951), which sees painter Gene Kelly finally realise he loves singer Georges Guétary's companion, Leslie Caron, rather than society heiress Nina Foch.
For once, New Year's Eve proves the starting point for a romance rather than its climax in Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957), as Cary Grant and Irene Dunne kiss aboard the ocean liner, SS Constitution, and vow to meet again in six months at the top of the Empire State Building if they still feel the same way and have managed to untangle themselves from existing commitments.
Office junior Sandro Panseri hopes to run into Loredana Detto at the New Year party in Ermanno Olmi's neorealist classic, Il Posto (1961) but ends up feeling like one of the boys when he spends the night dancing with his new workmates. Barbara Loden goes a lot further than simply revelling while seeing in 1929 in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961), which earned William Inge an Oscar for his screenplay. Much to the dismay of her oil tycoon father, Pat Hingle, she gets drunk and disappears into the night with one of the high school boys, causing brother Warren Beatty to get into a fight and fall out with best girl, Natalie Wood.
Richard Gere's GI has more luck with northern English lass Lisa Eichhorn in John Schlesinger's wartime saga, Yanks (1979), although it all kicks off at the 1944 New Year dance when some of the local lads take exception to their womenfolk dancing with the African-American soldiers.
Angela Bassett has her own way of dealing with husband Michael Beach's New Year's Eve revelation that he is leaving her for his white secretary in Forest Whitaker's Waiting to Exhale (1995), as she loads his clothes into his luxury car and smokes a cigarette in quiet satisfaction while they go up in flames. Porn cameraman William H. Macy opts for a more explosive solution to wife Nina Hartley's serial infidelities in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), as he bursts into a party to mark the end of the 1970s brandishing a gun. The start of the 80s is similarly considered a watershed moment in Mark Christopher's 54 (1998), which centres on the legendary nightclub, Studio 54, which was founded in the former CBS Studio on Manhattan's West 54th Street by Steve Rubell.
It all gets a bit bohemian in Ed Harris's Pollock (2000) and Chris Columbus's adaptation of Rent (2005), the hit Broadway musical spun off by Jonathan Larson from Giacomo Puccini's 1896 opera, La Bohème. In the former, Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris) fails to rise to the occasion after falling into bed with collector Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan) after a New Year party, while the latter sees street drummer Wilson Jermaine Heredia mark the arrival of 1990 by using a dustbin to smash the padlock that landlord Taye Diggs has placed on the apartment being rented by aspiring documentarist Anthony Rapp and HIV+ songwriter Adam Pascal.
Joaquin Phoenix plans to pop the question to Gwyneth Paltrow on New Year's Eve in James Gray's Two Lovers (2008), but she rejects him for married man Elias Koteas and it's only when he heads to the beach to end it all that he realises that the expensive engagement ring he has purchased would probably look better on the third finger of the ever-supportive Vinessa Shaw's left hand.
Easily the most dismaying recent film with a New Year setting is Ryan Cooglar's Fruitvale Station (2013), which chronicles the last hours of Oscar Grant III (Michael B. Jordan) before he was shot and fatally wounded by BART officers at 2.15am on 1 January 2009 in Oakland, California. During the course of the day, the 22 year-old argues with girlfriend Sophia (Melonie Diaz) and drops in to see his mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer) on her birthday. But not even the opening clips of found phone footage can prepare the audience for what happens when Grant is recognised by a casual acquaintance on the late train home.
Things That Go Bump At Midnight
There's nothing like an old legend to give a festive brush with the supernatural an extra frisson and, in The Phantom Carriage (1921), Swedish maestro Victor Sjöström latches on to the claim that the last person to die on New Year's Eve will spend the next year the collecting the souls of the departed. Drunkard David Holm (Victor Sjöström) is too busy telling his pals about the death of his old friend Georges (Tore Svennberg) to come to the bedside of ailing Salvation Army officer, Anna (Hilda Borgström). But a fight breaks out and Holm is struck over the head with a bottle at the clock chimes and who should be driving the carriage that comes to collect him but Georges.
There are plenty of other titles available from Cinema Paradiso to give you the New Year shivers, including the demonic duo of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Paul Wendkos's The Mephisto Waltz (1971).
Mia Farrow has a simply dreadful time at the party hosted by neighbours Sydney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon, as doctor Ralph Bellamy isn't interested in the abdominal pain she has been suffering and she catches herself gnawing on a piece of raw meat shortly after Blackmer offers the creepy toast, 'To 1966! To Year One!' Pianist Curd Jürgens and daughter Barbara Parkins throw an equally sinister soirée for music journalist Alan Alda and his wife Jacqueline Bisset, at which Bisset moves among the masked guests with a growing sense of trepidation.
Give Satan his due, he keeps trying and only washed-up ex-NYPD officer Arnold Schwarzenegger seems likely to stand in his way in Peter Hyams's End of Days (1993), after he possesses Wall Street banker Gabriel Byrne in order to conceive a child on the eve of the millennium with the virginal Robin Tunney. Moreover, Polanski clearly sees New Year as a dramatic time, as another unsettling party dominates the closing stages of Bitter Moon (1992), as Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas's cruise comes to a shocking end in the company of novelist Peter Coyote and his sexually liberated spouse, Emmanuelle Seigner.
You'll never be able to watch a Marx Brothers movie in the same way again after seeing Groucho get up to no good aboard Roger Spottiswoode's Terror Train (1980), which catches up with college student Jamie Lee Curtis, as her pals go off the rails during a New Year party that's held three years after a prank with a cadaver left one of their gang in an asylum. What's more, you'll never forget the sight of antique dealer Federico Luppi in his New Year bib and tucket lapping blood off the floor of the washroom in Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos (1993). Goodness knows what he would do with the Chalk of Fate that Konstantin Khabensky seeks on New Year's Day in Timur Bekmambetov's Day Watch (2006) to rewrite history, undo the mistakes made in Night Watch (2004) and prevent son Dmitri Martynov from going to the dark side.
The best-laid plans go hideously awry when Eva Birthistle takes her brood to spend New Year in the English countryside with sister Rachel Shelley in Tom Shankland's The Children (2008), as the cat vanishes, the kids start producing some bacterially vicious vomit and the grown-ups appear powerless to defend themselves from the ensuing mayhem. No one quite knows why so many people are suffering from delusions, suicidal tendencies and violent impulses at the start of Cody Calahan's Antisocial (2013). But all that Canadian student Michelle Mylett seems to care about when she shows up at Cody Ray Thompson's place for a New Year party is that she has just been dumped in an Internet chatroom. The ghoulish realities of online stranger danger are also made splatteringly apparent in 'New Year's Eve', Adam Egypt Mortimer's contribution to the anthology picture, Holidays (2016), which follows killer Andrew Bowen on a blind date after he meets Lorenza Izzo on a lonelyhearts site.
If Things Can Go Wrong
If there's one thing that science fiction films have to teach us about New Year, it's that it's often unwise to operate heavy machinery. Admittedly, H. George Wells (Rod Taylor) was probably asking for trouble when he decided to try out his new invention on the eve of a new century in George Pal's The Time Machine (1960). But, having informed his dinner guests on 31 December 1899 that time was 'the fourth dimension', he insists on pressing the lever and hurtles forward to 15 September 1917, the first stop in a journey that will also deposit him into the 802, 701, realm ruled by some flesh-eating Morlocks. Director Kathryn Bigelow pitches us into a dystopic Los Angeles that is two days away from the new millennium in Strange Days (1995), so that she can follow ex-cop and seller of stolen dreams Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), as he enlists the help of security expert Mace (Angela Bassett) and former partner Max (Tom Sizemore) to help him protect old flame Faith (Juliette Lewis) from a stalking killer.
Those who read the article on the 12 Films of Christmas Present will have discovered writer-director Shane Black's fondness for the festive season and he's in a New Year state of mind in Iron Man 3, which opens at the pre-millennial party at which Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) meets scientist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), who has invented the Extremis process that can regenerate damaged limbs. Such technology would be highly useful to Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) and his fellow rebels seeking to take control of the train circumnavigating a permafrosted Earth in Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013). However, their bid to reach the front compartments where transport tycoon Edgar (Jamie Bell) and his sinister minister Mason (Tilda Swinton) are ensconced is momentarily deflected when they recognise a station on the route and realise that it must be New Year.
Continuing the heavy machinery theme, Captain Leslie Nielsen is appalled when his dire warnings come true in Ronald Neame's The Poseidon Adventure (1972), when the liner SS Poseidon capsizes after being swept away by a tsunami wave during a Mediterranean cruise. Guests who had been celebrating New Year's Eve in the ballroom suddenly find themselves fighting for their lives. But, while many perish, a small group led by pastor Gene Hackman clamber up a Christmas tree and begin their epic journey to safety.
Subsequently, sea marshall Adam Baldwin leads an all-star party of survivors towards their rescuers after terrorists detonate a New Year bomb midway between Cape Town and Sydney in John Putch's teleplay, Poseidon Adventure (2005), while New York firefighter Kurt Russell emerges as the selfless leader after a freak wave topples RMS Poseidon during yet another ill-fated New Year celebration (when will the owners learn?) in Poseidon (2006), which was directed by Wolfgang Petersen, who knows a thing or two about filming underwater having made the magnificent study of U-96's exploits in the North Atlantic in Das Boot (1981).
On This of All Nights
Movie crooks soon learned that New Year's Eve was a propitious night for a big job and Stanley Field's mob hit upon the date for their raid on Maurice Black's Bronze Peacock in Mervyn LeRoy's gutsy adaptation of W.R. Burnett's novel, Little Caesar (1931). However, they didn't reckon on crime commissioner Landers Stevens being on the premises and the gang give the cops added incentive for tracking them down when Edward G. Robinson guns Stevens down in a display of bravura that is pugnaciously captured by editor Ray Curtis in a montage sequence that set the tone for the Warner gangster cycle. However, the pace is markedly more laid back, as William Powell and Myrna Loy reprise the roles of bibulous private detectives Nick and Nora Charles in WS Van Dyke's After the Thin Man (1936), which sees the couple spend their New Year's Eve searching for the wastrel husband of Loy's cousin, Elissa Landi, who has been missing for three days since falling in with a bad crowd.
Showing how much Hollywood had changed from the bad old days of the Production Code, the villains are very much the heroes of Lewis Milestone's Ocean's 11 (1960), as Frank Sinatra and his buddies from the 82nd Airborne Division plot to cause chaos in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve by causing a power cut that will disable the security systems at five casinos: The Sahara, The Riviera, The Desert Inn, The Flamingo and The Sands. What made the inclusion of the latter something of an in-joke was that Sinatra had shares in the business and regularly played there, along with such Rat Pack pals as Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., who help ensure the Strip is plunged into darkness while everyone is belting out 'Auld Lang Syne'.
We'll return to this New Year anthem shortly. But we have a few more nefarious deeds to mention first. Perhaps the most heinous of them all is the kiss that Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) gives his brother Fredo (John Cazale) during the family's New Year celebration in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II (1974). As he has discovered that Fredo has deceived him, Michael uses this gesture to pass a death sentence upon him, which he confirms with the words, 'I know it was you Fredo; you broke my heart.' As crime boss Alphonse 'Big Boy' Caprice, Pacino finds himself on the wrong side of another double cross in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy (1990), when the eponymous 1930s detective (Tracy) wreaks revenge for the abduction of girlfriend Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) by tipping off the cops about Big Boy's New Year jamboree at Club Ritz.
While the rest of New York is partying, foster brother transit cops Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson make a bid to rob the subway service carrying the network's daily takings in Joseph Ruben's Money Train (1995). Although they have debts, this tilt at pinching $500,000 is inspired more by their detestation of boss Robert Blake, who had put their lives at risk over the Christmas holiday by refusing to delay the eponymous train while they were pursuing a mugger through the tunnels. Insurance investigator Catherine Zeta-Jones also has it in for her boss, Will Hutton, in Jon Amiel's Entrapment (1999). Thus, she forges an alliance with master cracksman Sean Connery to exploit concerns about the Y2K bug to conduct a New Millennium Eve heist that will net them $8 billion belonging to the International Clearance Bank based in the Petronas Towers in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
Puerto Rico is the setting for the New Year fundraiser at which tax attorney Gene Hackman is set to give a speech in Stephen Hopkins's Under Suspicion (2000). However, cop Morgan Freeman is curious about the inconsistencies in Hackman's account of how he found a murdered rape victim and, even though Freeman is forced to let him attend the function, the peculiar behaviour of Hackman's younger wife, Monica Bellucci, makes him seem more than ever like the prime suspect. The questions that six friends think they have answered anonymously in Max Makowski's Taboo (2002) similarly come back to haunt them on New Year's Eve when the power fails and a package arrives accusing them all of being sexual deviants.
Things also get out of hand on the last day of the year in Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), when John Cho talks fellow students Parry Shen, Jason Tobin and Karin Anna Cheung into burgling his rich parents. The biggest casino in Mumbai is the New Year's Eve target for John Abraham and his motorbike gang in Sanjay Gadhvi's Dhoom (2004), while the soon-to-close police station to which bigwig Laurence Fishburne is detoured during a snowstorm comes under New Year attack in Jean-François Richet's Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), a loose remake of a classic John Carpenter thriller from 1976 that sees Ethan Hawke and Brian Dennehy play the cops detailed with keeping their perp safe. And Diplomatic Security Service agent Milla Jovovich also has to act quickly in James McTeigue's Survivor (2015), when she discovers that ace assassin Pierce Brosnan intends to cause carnage in Time Square as the New Year arrives by firing a bullet into the gas-filled ball as it drops so that he and his mysterious client can make a killing on the stock market.
Auld Lang Syne
Come midnight on 1 January, everyone will be linking arms and singing 'Auld Lang Syne'. The tune itself has been heard in many a memorable movie.
When Charlie Chaplin wrote a new score for The Gold Rush in 1942, he incorporated 'Auld Lang Syne' into the sequence in which Scotty sings at the dance hall while the Little Tramp is dreaming of entertaining his dinner guests with the Oceana Roll Dance in his lonely cabin. Frank Capra also recognised the sentimental pull of the tune and had the brass band play it during Gary Cooper's departure from Mandrake Falls in Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and as James Stewart realises he is central to the life of Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life.
However, it sounds more melancholy than ever in Billy Wilder's lament for old Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard (1950), after screenwriter William Holden walks out on the New Year party for two thrown by fading film star Gloria Swanson and is forced to return from a boisterous shindig on being informed over the phone by butler Erich von Stroheim that Swanson has tried to kill herself. But, as the band plays the old refrain, there is something chilling about the way the diva wishes him 'Happy New Year, darling', as her long nails wrap around his neck in an embrace that fades to black.
The same year saw Akira Kurosawa give the song a folky twist in his tenth feature, Scandal, as dispirited painter Toshiro Mifune and lawyer roommate Takashi Shimura wander into a Tokyo dive, where drunk Bokuzen Hidari makes a slurred promise to go on the wagon before joining in a discordant version of 'Auld Lang Syne' that is deeply moving in its shambolicness.
A New Year party kiss between Meryl Streep and Robert Redford signifies a change in the relationship between Danish novelist Karen Blixen and big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton in Sydney Pollack's Oscar-winning adaptation of Out of Africa (1985), which was released in the same year that the tune rang out in Walter Hill's updating of George Barr McCutheon's 1902 novel, Brewster's Millions, in which Hackensack Bulls baseball pitcher Richard Pryor is challenged to spend $30 million in a month in order to earn the $300 million bequeathed to him by eccentric relative, Hume Cronyn.
Keep your ears open for more renditions in Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (1994), Terence Davies's Sunset Song, Todd Haynes's Carol, Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda's Minions (all 2015), and Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017). But, while everyone has a soft spot for Zooey Deschanel singing the song to James Caan's piano accompaniment at the end of Jon Favreau's Elf (2003), the most eye-moistening recent screen version has to be the one by Mairi Campbell in Michael Patrick King's Sex and the City: The Movie (2008), which counterpoints a montage showing Charlotte (Kristin Davis) making merry with her family, Samantha (Kim Cattrall) having a cosy night in with Smith (Jason Lewis) and Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) braving the snow-covered streets of New York to see in the New Year with Miranda (Cynthia Nixon).
Do you have favourite films set around New Year's? For an additional taste of holidays check out the festive film's collection!
