13 films & series to watch this holiday season 🍂

...with its enchanting atmosphere and festive spirit — the perfect backdrop for the art of stories — told across flickering screens to unfold. Here are 13 of my recent favourites.

VENGEANCE

The story begins in earnest when New Yorker writer and aspiring public intellectual Ben Manalowitz gets a call at his Manhattan apartment late one night from Ty Shaw his sister, Ben’s girlfriend—who is oddly also named Abilene, Abby for short—has died. And then the twists begin. It’s funny, it’s clever, it’s thrilling and it’s classic Americana. 

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

If you’re in the mood for a little soft romance and want to be picked up and carried away into another world for a couple of hours, this will do it for you. The tone is distinctly feelgood, but the film thoughtfully explores the different ways that relationships can be built, and what cultures can teach one another. Is it, in fact, more sensible to be pragmatic about relationships, rather than blindly led by the tempers of passion? And do Western relationships owe more to the idea of arranged marriage than we realise? What about dating apps or, say, the royal family?

A GOOD PERSON

I loved this one with Florence Pugh, starring opposite Morgan Freeman, in this laboured tale of redemption. She plays Allison, a woman whose soft indie-soundtracked bliss is interrupted by a deadly car crash. In its wake, she’s barely able to process what’s happened and becomes addicted to the opioids prescribed by her doctor and then abruptly taken away. Written and directed by Zach Baff A Good Person is also fuelled by Braff’s own emotions – he wrote its script after a period of profound grief, in which he lost his father, sister, and best friend in a short span of time. Get ready to hold your heart and weep at times.

SLIP

Slip is a combination of multiverse with erotic drama. It feels a little revolutionary, the kind of secret thing communicated between women, not in words, but in expressions, finally put down on paper. It peels back a yellow wallpaper of a different kind, and beyond the comedy lies something that makes it easy to put this series among my favourites of the year.

HOW IT ENDS

Imagine spending a day with your inner child or younger self, to right all the hurts you were imparted in your life so far. That’s what this film is and why I love it so much. Psychology, therapy, thriller, drama, drugs, love. It has it all. Plus, the world is ending.

DOSED

A raw and insightful portrait of the psychology fueling addiction, and how the healing of pain and depression must be tackled in a healthy way. During these increasingly uncertain days, the film’s timeliness is twofold, in light of both the lives lost last year to opioids and the untold lives around the world currently crippled with anxiety amidst the current Western way of life, making them all the more susceptible to any available method for numbing their senses.

NOMADLAND

When the gypsum plant there closed, the town of Empire quite literally closed with it. In six months, its entire zip code was eliminated. In this nightmare state, Fern’s husband died, leaving her completely alone and, well, she likes the word “houseless” more than “homeless.” Hitting the road in search of work as a seasonal employee Fern starts living in her van, eventually getting involved with a group of modern nomads, people who sometimes form makeshift communities, but she inevitably ends up alone again, traversing the American landscape. It is a gorgeous film that’s alternately dreamlike in the way it captures the beauty of this country and grounded in its story about the kind of person we don’t usually see in movies. I love everything about it.

SILO

If you enjoy a bit of sci-fi like I do, you’ll like this series. The stunning premiere—one of my favourite first episodes in a long time—sets the stage in a way that doesn’t even centre on the eventual protagonist of this show. “Silo” trusts its viewers with complex themes, multiple arcs, and a shifting narrative that forces us to trust the creators too. The concept is — just over 10,000 people live in a massive underground bunker — known as the Silo. History has been destroyed to such a degree that the residents aren’t sure how they got there or what happened to the outside world. All they know is that it’s deadly outside. They can see it. Or can they?

ASTEROID CITY

I don’t think I’ll ever tire of Wes Anderson’s films. Imagine a gorgeous butterfly landing on your heart and then squeezing on that heart with sharp pincers you never knew it had. 

ANAIS IN LOVE

A film in French to be prepared to read subtitles if you don’t speak French featuring charming ‘bulldozer’ Anaïs sprinting after emotional stimulants in a breezy tale of a graduate student who seduces her publisher’s partner.

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY

Women are smart and beautiful and can do anything we want is the essential message of this series so beautifully brought together through an engaging script, beautiful consumes and set designs. Imagine Mad Men set in academia instead of Madison Avenue and controlled by a female voice.

FINGERNAILS

Heartache and horror walk hand in hand in “Fingernails,” a disarmingly sweet science-fiction romance from the Greek director Christos Nikou. Opening with a brief explanation of the title — the first sign of heart disease is often noticed in the fingernails — and closing on a note of indescribable yearning, this gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness. And leaves you with all the questions about love we have running through our minds most of the time.

SHE CAME TO ME

A love-triangle-comedy, that’s easy to watch, and sweet enough to share with any family member.