Film

Christmas may ostensibly be a time of goodwill to all men, but war rarely takes a break for the festive season – as events in Ukraine sadly demonstrate. Here are ten films set during Yuletide where the front line is front and centre: Castle Keep (1968) – Amazon Rent/Buy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uALKeb0C6U&t=1s Sydney Pollack’s (Three Days of the Condor) Castle Keep is set during the Germans’ failed Ardennes offensive of December 1944 and stars Burt Lancaster as one-eyed US Major Abraham Falconer. But if from that description you expect a meat-and-potatoes world war two actioner, think again.

This week, in homes across the land, there is one guarantee: somewhere, someone will be watching one of the Indiana Jones films, and it’ll likely be the first or the third in the series. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are little less than perfect seasonal comfort food: witty, exciting, stuffed full of indelible characters and unforgettable set-piece action scenes. These films stand as those rare pictures that, however many times you watch them, continue to be fabulously entertaining. The others in the franchise – Temple of Doom and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – are less effective, and the latter has become a byword for mediocrity.

It is 122 years this week since Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde died – in exile, poverty and disgrace – at Paris’s shabby St Germain Hôtel d'Alsace. His last words were said to be: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us must go.’ Despite Wilde’s precipitous fall from grace and the ignominy heaped upon him (his children had to change their surname to Holland), within a relatively brief time his plays were revived and books reissued to renewed popular acclaim. And more than a century later, that appeal hasn’t faded: this year in England alone, The Importance of Being Earnest toured the north and Richard Strauss’s adaptation of Salome was performed at the Royal Opera House.

‘I know,’ I said to my friend recently. ‘Let’s see a film!’ We booked the Everyman Kings Cross, the only cinema that happened to be showing what we wanted to watch at a convenient time and location. You might already be familiar with the Everyman concept. According to the chain, it’s ‘redefining cinema’ with an ‘innovative lifestyle approach to our venues, where you swap your soft drink for a nice glass of red wine and a slice of freshly made pizza served to your seat’. And apparently it's popular – an Everyman opened in September in Egham, Surrey, bringing the total to 38, and another one is announced for Durham early next year. But after my latest visit, I found myself marvelling at the success of what might be the most annoying cinema concept on earth.

George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito some time in early March 1923. The bite became infected. By April he was running a high fever, had pneumonia in both lungs and his heart and respiratory systems were failing. He died in a Cairo hospital on 5 April. His death came less than six months after Howard Carter, the Egyptologist whose excavations Carnarvon was funding, first discovered evidence that there was an undisturbed tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Thebes. That was on 4 November 1922 – 100 years ago this month. A few days later, Carter, Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, had squeezed through a roughly-hewn hole in the wall of the burial chamber of Tutankhamun, uncovering its glittering treasures.

Andrew Dominik’s film Blonde, a story of Marilyn Monroe's life based on an adaptation of a Joyce Carol Oates novel, has been the subject of much divisive discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Caren Spruch of Planned Parenthood told the Hollywood Reporter that she sees the film as 'anti-abortion propaganda'. A tweet that went viral said filmmaker 'Andrew Dominik didn’t even try to conceal his anti-choice views and hatred for Marilyn'.

In a month that has seen more than its fair share of chaos, I had hoped the release of the first-ever Emily Brontë biopic would at last offer some cause for celebration. But Emily, which arrived in cinemas this week, has provided quite the opposite.  Frances O'Connor’s directorial debut focuses on a fling between Emily (played by Emma Mackey) and her father Patrick’s dishy assistant curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), suggesting that their racy romance inspired Wuthering Heights.  Not only is there no evidence that this relationship took place, but there are clues that it was actually the youngest of the sisters, Anne, who caught Weightman's eye.