The Christmas season is one of the most pivotal times in the cinema calendar year, with major blockbusters, awards hopefuls and crowdpleasers dropping in droves. Here’s what to prioritise at the multiplex as we say goodbye to 2025 and welcome in 2026.
VIEW will be taking a break over the holiday season, which means that there’s a healthy glut of cinema that will go unreported on (though stay tuned for next week’s Best of 2025 list!) but is well worth making time for. Around the time 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, one of my most eagerly awaited releases of 2026, drops, we’ll be back in business. Here’s what I’ve got my eye on in the festive weeks ahead:
Awards contenders:
We’re barrelling head-first into Oscar season now, and while many of the year’s frontrunners (One Battle After Another, Sinners — both of which may yet get another IMAX run) have already made themselves known, there’s plenty to keep an eye out for: the best is likely to be the family drama Sentimental Value (8 January), which bowed earlier this year at Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival. This is sure to be a heavy hitter at the Oscars, with possible wins on the line for all four of its headlining cast — Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard, Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, as well as potential Picture and Director nods for The Worst Person in the World’s Joachim Trier. Also worth keeping an eye out for is The History of Sound (18 December), an historical queer love story that’s been drawing comparisons to Brokeback Mountain, though its setting, World War II, is quite different — and its reception far less effusive.
Boxing Day brings Rental Family (December 26) to the big screen — this weepie drama starring Brendan Fraser as a washed-up actor who takes a job playing absent family members for Japanese citizens looks to be the one to take your Mum to in those quiet post-Christmas, pre-2026 days. Song Sung Blue (January 1), meanwhile, seems to be largely focusing its award ambitions on Kate Hudson, whose (very good) central performance is the standout of this based-on-a-true story musical drama about a pair of down-on-their luck musicians who form a Neil Diamond cover-band. As an avowed Diamond fanatic, even the film’s messiness and overt sentimentality can’t dim my affection for it — indeed, isn’t that what we also go to Diamond himself for?
In the New Year, we’ll also get a chance to take a look at the already-notorious Christy (8 January). David Michôd’s boxing flick, profiling Christy Martin, has been touted as a potential award vehicle for star Sydney Sweeney — though those dreams may have been dashed by her having seemingly courted the MAGA crowd, and the film’s subsequent, diabolical (and record-breaking) American box office take. Intriguingly, such external factors have come at the expense of what, I’ve heard, is a genuinely very strong performance.
Blockbusters
All eyes will be on James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash (18 December). Easily the biggest title of the Christmas season, the third instalment of Cameron’s divisive, block-busting series is heavily rumoured to be Cameron’s last go-round with the material, as well as one that needs to make a truly eye-watering sum of money to continue forward. Cameron has beat the odds before — The Way of Water was a superior film to the original, and one that grossed enough to rival the original’s massive success. Will he pull off the hattrick? That remains to be seen.
Anaconda (December 26) had one of the worst trailers I’ve seen this year — a goofy twist on a tired piece of IP that has been dusted off for the ‘ironic send-up’ treatment in the mold of 21 Jump Street. This one stars Paul Rudd and Jack Black (looking old for the first time) as fans of the original movie hoping to pull together a remake, only to find themselves menaced by a giant snake in the Amazon ripped straight from the original. There’s no real way around it — this one looks godawful, another example of Hollywood studios circling the drain with reboots that may as well be AI-generated, so uninspired and empty they appear.
The Housemaid (25 December) continues Sydney Sweeney’s Metallica-esque never-ending tour of publicity, her final chance to snag box office success after three major flops in Americana, Christy and Eden. Early projections are promising for the film, based on an apparently popular book by Freida McFadden and directed by Paul Feig, who hasn’t made a good film in a decade and yet found the middling A Simple Favour skyrocketing to success. The literary adaptation crowd are one of the more reliable audiences available to the modern studio (just see the regretfully titled Regretting You, a secret box office smash earlier in 2025, for proof) — can it resuscitate this flailing starlet’s downhill slope?
For the little ones, there’s really only one film worth looking out for: The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants (26 December). The Spongebob movies have a surprisingly strong pedigree — almost every big screen adventure for the cartoon icon has been worth a look, particularly the original The Spongebob Squarepants Movie. Whether this continues that trend is a moot point — kids love Spongebob, after all.
Must-sees
It doesn’t feel like a film such as Ella McCay (11 December) could be considered ‘under-the-radar’, considering it is a Disney release, and yet the first film from James L. Brooks in over a decade seems set to make barely a ripple in the cinema firmament of 2025. Yes, the director of Broadcast News, As Good As It Gets and Terms of Endearment has a new film coming out, though you’d be forgiven for not knowing this. Seemingly greenlit to ensure Brooks’ involvement in next year’s new Simpsons movie, this dramedy stars the enormously underrated Emma Mackey as the titular Ella, a young Lieutenant Governor of a liberal state preparing to make the transition to Governor proper after her mentor accepts a job in the Obama administration (making this a period piece, of sorts). Brooks has assembled a typically stellar cast around Mackey — Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Lowden, Kumail Nanjiani, Rebecca Hall, Woody Harrelson, Ayo Edibiri, and even the mighty Albert Brooks. Still, studios seemingly no longer know how to market modest family dramas of this sort, and so we must assume that McCay will be lost in the noise, deservedly or not.
Two other low-key releases have caught my eye. Primate (8 January) had a screening at this year’s Terror-Fi, one that I was sad to miss. I’ve heard that this is an enormously enjoyable, nasty little man-versus-animal thriller in the vein of Crawl or Beast, about a pet chimp who takes a turn for the murderous. It looks like perfect January fodder — switch your brain off entertainment of a high order. For the more serious-minded, there’s Cover-Up (26 December), which is getting a streaming-only release. The latest film from master documentarian Laura Poitras (Citizenfour, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed) covers the six-decade career of journalist Seymour Hersh, taking aim at those who wish to suppress genuine news reporting and freedom of the press. Poitras is one of the most essential political documentarians working today, and any work from her shouldn’t be passed over.
The rest
Silent Night Deadly Night (11 December) is the latest remake/reboot of the Christmas-themed horror series, focusing on a murderous psychopath dressed, naturally, as Santa Claus. Yuletide themed horrors are an acquired taste, certainly — the gold standard being 1974’s Black Christmas, which you might be better off watching instead when all is said and done. Atropia (12 December) won the top prize at Sundance this year, to the surprise of many. Actress Hailey Gates’ directorial debut, starring Alia Shawkat as an aspiring actress playing pan-Middle Eastern victims and aggressors in an American military role-playing facility, is an aimless, limp rom-com-slash-political-drama, one that never figures out what it wants to be. Its tonal mish-mash is matched by its pseudo-intellectual, self-congratulatory posturing regarding the War on Terror. Avoid.
Lastly, a local film worth making time for: Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke (26 December) is a loving portrait of New Zealand’s iconic satirist and comedian John Clarke, who passed away in 2017. The film is directed by his daughter, Lorin Clarke, and investigates Clarke’s resolute anti-authoritarian streak — something by which New Zealanders should feel inspired. Notes From a Fish, which released earlier this month, is also worth seeking out — ambitious, self-funded local work that ought to be supported.
Here’s my top five picks for the Christmas season: The Housemaid, Song Sung Blue, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Sentimental Value and Ella McCay. Ho, ho, ho.