30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

The Ice Harvest follows these developments with the humor of an Elmore Leonard project and the interlocking violence of a Blood Simple. The movie, directed by Harold Ramis, finds a balance between the goofy and the gruesome, as in a rather brilliant scene in which a mobster who is locked inside a trunk is nevertheless optimistic enough to shout out muffled death threats. For some reason, there is always humor in those crime scenarios where tough guys find it’s easy to conceive diabolical acts, exhausting to perform them. It’s one thing to lock a man in a trunk, another to get the trunk into the back seat of a Mercedes, still another to push it down a dock and into a lake. If the job ended with locking the trunk, you’d have more people in trunks.

The key to the movie’s humor is Cusack’s calm patience in the face of catastrophe. He has always been curiously angelic—the last altar boy you’d suspect of having stolen the collection plate. In The Ice Harvest, he is essentially a kind man. Consider his concern for Pete, a friend who has gotten very drunk on Christmas Eve because, as he confesses, he’s not man enough to fill his chair at the family dinner table. That Charlie takes time to bail his friend out of tight spots and give him good advice speaks well of a man so heavily scheduled with stealing and killing.

Vic, the Thornton character, is one of those Billy Bob specials whose smile is charming but not reassuring. Consider the moment after he and Charlie obtain the briefcase filled with the loot, and Vic drops Charlie off at home and Charlie reaches for the case and Vic reaches for it first, and they realize they have not discussed who will keep the case for the time being, and Vic asks if this is going to be a problem, and you know that if Charlie takes the case, it is definitely going to be a problem.

Nielsen has a bruised charm as the sexy Renata. She’s sexy, but weary of being sexy. It is such a responsibility. The movie has a quiet in-joke when Charlie asks her, “Where are you from, anyway?” He doesn’t think she sounds like she’s from around here. Of Nielsen’s last sixteen movies, all but one was American, and she has a flawless American accent, but in fact she is Danish. She never does answer Charlie’s question. The obvious answer is: “A long way from Kansas.”

I liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal, and spectacularly complicated ways to die. I liked it for Charlie’s essential kindness, as when he pauses during a getaway to help a friend who has run out of gas. And for the scene-stealing pathos of Oliver Platt’s drunk, who like many drunks in the legal profession achieves a rhetorical grandiosity during the final approach to oblivion. And I liked especially the way Roy, the man in the trunk, keeps on thinking positively, even after Vic puts bullets through both ends of the trunk because he can’t remember which end of the trunk Roy’s head is at. Maybe it’s in the middle.

It's a Wonderful Life

NO MPAA RATING, 129 m., 1946

James Stewart (George Bailey), Donna Reed (Mary Hatch), Lionel Barrymore (Mr. Potter), Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy), Henry Travers (Clarence), Beulah Bondi (Mrs. Bailey), Frank Faylen (Ernie), Ward Bond (Bert), Gloria Grahame (Violet Bick), H.B. Warner (Mr. Gower). Produced and directed by Frank Capra. Written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Capra, and Jo Swerling, based on “The Greatest Gift,” by Philip Van Doren Stern.

The best and worst things that ever happened to It’s a Wonderful Life are that it fell out of copyright protection and into the shadowy no-man’s-land of the public domain. Because the movie is no longer under copyright, any television station that can get its hands on a print of the movie can show it, at no cost, as often as it wants to. And that has led in the last decade to the rediscovery of Frank Capra’s once-forgotten film, and its elevation into a Christmas tradition. PBS stations were the first to jump on the bandwagon in the early 1970s, using the saga of the small-town hero George Bailey as counter-programming against expensive network holiday specials. To the general amazement of TV program directors, the audience for the film grew and grew over the years, until now many families make the movie an annual ritual.