Staying in with the old: the best films to watch on New Year’s Eve

For those not going out to celebrate, you can still party with Harry and Sally, play cards with Jack Lemmon and make merry hell at the Overlook Hotel At the end of any especially troublesome year it’s always good to revisit The Apartment, Billy Wilder’s brilliantly bleak comedy of office politics and festive bad cheer. It memorably ends on the stroke of midnight as heartsick Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) abandons a drunken new year’s party to be with hapless, jobless CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) instead. Is The Apartment suggesting that Kubelik and Baxter then live happily ever after? Probably not, because I’ve never been convinced that these two lovers are going to stay the course. They’re too mismatched and desperate; their wounds are still too fresh. What the ending gives us is the next best thing: a sudden sense of hope and freedom, with everything packed in boxes except for a bottle, two glasses and a deck of cards. Nothing to lose and nowhere to go. “Shut up and deal.” A clean brea...

Butterfly Tale review – kids insect story wants to take long trip south to Mexico

Anodyne children’s picture provides some gentle entertainment once you forgive the cloying anthropomorphism

‘Is that a butterfly fairy?” asks a confused seven-year-old who watches with me, pointing to the screen at the start of this Canadian animated tale. Nope. The purple creature with a humanish face and body, dressed in a hoodie, wings poking out of its back, is in fact the film’s rendering of a monarch butterfly. The film-makers behind this have really outdone themselves with their tackily revolting anthropomorphic butterflies. Still, if you can get past mutilating a wonder of nature, the movie is a harmless and rather sweet cartoon for under-eights.

Teenager Patrick is a monarch who cannot fly because of an undeveloped wing. His dad was a big hero in the community after pecking out the eye of a fearsome eagle (he paid the price too). But because of his wing, Patrick has been banned from taking part in the annual winter migration south to Mexico. Not this year, says his overprotective mum. (The film ignores the fact that the monarchs make their incredible epic journey only once.) So, Patrick turns stowaway, hiding in the emergency food supply with his chubby caterpillar pal.

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