One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an explora­tion of death. We are are closing out the December portion of our retrospective on the legendary director’sw work with a brand 4K restoration of it thanks to our friends at Janus Films! 

Takashi Shimura beautifully portrays Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer who is impelled to find meaning in his final days. Presented in a radically conceived two­part structure and shot with a perceptive, humanistic clarity of vision, Ikiru is a multifaceted look at what it means to be alive.

Across our entire staff, if there was a movie we could all agree on being the definitive holiday season masterpiece of the past 25 years, it would be Todd Hayne’s Carol.

Starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara (are you kidding me?), the film is set in 1950s New York, and follows a shy young shopgirl and aspiring photographer, who becomes captivated by Carol Aird, an elegant woman trapped in a failing marriage. As the two grow closer, their connection deepens into a forbidden romance that threatens Carol’s custody battle for her daughter. Forced onto a road trip that becomes both an escape and a reckoning, the women must decide whether their love can survive the scrutiny and constraints of their time.

In the years since its release, Carol has become a pop-cultural touchstone that perfectly blends a holiday-season staple and  queer cinematic landmark. For pop culture purposes, it’s perhaps the most GIFed slow-burn romance of the internet age. Its influence can be seen all over the rise of prestige LGBTQ+ storytelling across screens big and small. Some movies change your life forever.

A candy-coated fever dream of holiday excess, Jim Carrey’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas is finally making its way to our screens!

When it hit theaters in 2000, How the Grinch Stole Christmas wasn’t just another family holiday movie — it was a full-blown pop-culture phenomenon. Ron Howard and his crew turned Dr. Seuss’s 1957 classic into a live-action spectacle dripping with turn-of-the-millennium maximalism. Carrey’s Grinch is still one of the great comic performances of the era mixing weird creature effects with a full-blown existential meltdown. It’s the role that cemented him as the only actor unafraid (or unhinged enough) to try to out-Seuss Dr. Seuss.

Two decades later, How the Grinch Stole Christmas remains a strange and wonderful artifact of a bygone blockbuster era: a holiday movie made with the scale of a theme-park ride. It was easy to write off a movie like this at the time, but honestly? I don’t think we realized how good we had it.