As Boxing Day dawns, and with it the post-Christmas anomie, year-end sloth and Quality Street tins denuded of everything but toffees, what you need are some films to stream. The following, available to watch now, might address your wintry mood and beguile during this annual limbo of inactivity.
Nightmare Alley
Keep out of the cold by watching Guillermo Del Toro’s spectacular noir melodrama, set in a fairground. Bradley Cooper plays a homeless drifter in the 1940s who gets a job at a travelling carnival and devises a cheesy mind-reading act, which eventually brings him into contact with an elegant psychoanalyst, played by Cate Blanchett. A gloriously nasty, seedy affair. Disney+
Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
It’s a time to be with your family, and to indulge in a bit of nostalgia for past gatherings. So settle down to this superb Rotoscope animation from Richard Linklater: a gorgeous memory of a late-60s childhood in the US, obsessing about the moon landing – and a boy’s fantasy about a kid being asked by Nasa to train for a secret space mission. Netflix
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle
The Christmas period used to be a time for slumping in front of the TV watching classic war movies such as The Great Escape and Where Eagles Dare. And it’s not quite true that they don’t make them like that any more. This is a really well made old-school film from Japan about Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who held out in the Philippine jungle after the second world war, only surrendering in 1974. There is something gripping and tragicomic in this extraordinary true story. Available to buy or rent on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube, Microsoft and Google Play
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Maybe you feel claustrophobic, crammed together with your family in this festive period. Then let that mood find expression in this superb comedy set almost entirely in a single hotel room. Emma Thompson is a middle-aged widow and retired teacher who has decided to pay a personable sex worker called Leo, played by Daryl McCormack, to give her an orgasm for the first time in her life. Superb performances from them both. Available to buy or rent on Prime Video, iTunes, YouTube, Curzon, Chili, Microsoft, BFI Player and Google Play
Moonage Daydream
There was a time when zoning out in front of the Christmas Top Of The Pops was de rigueur, and now nostalgists do the same thing with BBC Four repeats of TOTPs of yesteryear. But this is in another league: a glorious documentary about David Bowie – a shape shifting eulogy-slash-freakout, mashing up live performance footage, Bowie’s experimental art and paintings, movies and interviews. Perhaps most special of all, it shows the fans of the 70s gathering outside London’s Hammersmith Odeon (as it then was), all made up to look like the man himself. What a treat. Available to buy or rent on Prime Video
