There’s a choice of superheroes this week: DC’s fishy Aquaman and Sony’s animated Spider-Man. If neither of those appeal and the ‘season of goodwill’ is already making you feel murderous, you might prefer Lars Von Trier’s serial killer flick The House That Jack Built or lesbian axe murderer drama Lizzie. Anyone craving a prequel to Michael Bay’s Transformers series will be overjoyed to find previews of Bumblebee on Sat, Sun and Thur.
We’ve helpfully corralled all those Christmassy screenings so you don’t have to hunt them down individually. This week’s selections range from a free outdoor screening of Polar Express to Bristol Bad Film Club’s seasonal outrage Don’t Open Till Christmas, Ingmar Bergman’s atypically cheerful Fanny and Alexander and the Curzon’s day out in a Portishead cow shed.
Elsewhere, Come the Revolution screens Spike Lee’s rarely screened blackface satire Bamboozled at the Colston Hall, Bristol Film Festival stages a takeover of the City Museum, the French Film Festival on Tour concludes at the Watershed and the Encounters Festival brings Josie Long to the Arnolfini for a screening of Super November.
Follow the links below for further details and screening times and go here for our comprehensive film listings.
Film / Action
DC's sushi superhero gets his own origin movie
Film / Action
Franchise spin-off animation with a half-Puerto Rican, half-African-American Spider-Man
Film / Art House
Great provocateur Lars von Trier's serial killer drama gives the easily offended what they crave
Film / Drama
Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart star in a lesbian feminist axe murderer drama
Film / Action
A post-apocalyptic steampunk romp set in a world of giant perambulating cities
Film / Documentary
Documentary following Alex Honnold as he scales Yosemite's El Capitan wall - without a rope
Film / Comedy
Timely revival of 80s feminist comedy about three female workers taking on their sexist boss
Film / Drama
Dennis Hopper's free-wheeling 1971 folly, now fully restored
Film / Action
DC's sushi superhero gets his own origin movie
Film / Action
Franchise spin-off animation with a half-Puerto Rican, half-African-American Spider-Man
Film / Action
A post-apocalyptic steampunk romp set in a world of giant perambulating cities
Film / Horror
The BBFC serves its Christmas turkey in the form of this festive 1984 slasher
Film / Event Cinema
Festive fun for pre-schoolers as CBeebies does the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale
Film / Event Cinema
Disney's original 1964 supernatural childminder musical screened in a cow shed
Film / Comedy
Free outdoor screening of the comedy in which Bill Murray does Dickens
Film / Family
Interminable '60s whimsy with a screenplay by Roald Dahl
Film / Art House
Bergman gets festive on our asses with his warm and optimistic 1982 swansong
Film / Action
Festive screenings of Bruce Willis's first outing as the vesty avenger
Film / Comedy
Richard Curtis's festive romcom makes its annual return
Film / Comedy
8-year-old Macaulay Culkin pulls that face in mystifyingly popular festive comedy
Film / Drama
Hit musical biopic of US huckster P.T. Barnum screened in a car park at Bristol Airport
Film / Comedy
Michael Caine is Scrooge in the greatest of all Dickens adaptations (possibly)
Film / Comedy
Ursine marmalade junkie invades Bristol City Museum
Film / Comedy
Love, Actually meets House Swap in this festive screwball romcom
Film / Comedy
Comedian Josie Long's feature debut, introduced by director Doug King and followed by a performance
Film / Event Cinema
New Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin launches his tenure by conducting Verdi’s great tragedy
Film / Ballet
If it's December, it must be The Nutcracker
Film / Event Cinema
The Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical
Film / Fantasy
The sixth film in the loud and empty Transformers franchise - a prequel to the first one
Film / Comedy
Spike Lee's rarely seen satire about a black TV exec whose minstrel show proves an unexpected hit
Film / Comedy
Robert Townsend's ahead-of-its-time comedy about Hollywood's stereotyping of African-Americans
Film / Art House
Janques Tati's 1953 comedy classic, without which there would have been no Mr. Bean
Film / Art House
Terence Davies's thematic sequel to his much-praised Distant Voices, Still Lives
Film / Drama
Your chance to bellow along with the hit musical phenomenon outdoors on the Downs
Film / Comedy
Isabelle Huppert stars in a comic, gender-swap reimagining of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Film / Drama
Things turn nasty as an ambitious businesswoman attempts to shatter the glass ceiling
Film / Documentary
Jean-Luc Godard's state of the world video essay
Film / Animation
Ralph and chums escape to worlds filled with other Disney properties in animated sequel
Film / Comedy
Oakland rapper Boots Riley's surreal and satirical science fiction comedy
Film / Animation
Benedict Cumberbatch voices the Christmas-hating furry verdant person in Dr. Seuss animation
Film / Drama
Rejoice - it's the eighth Rocky movie!
Film / Art House
Hirokazu Kore-eda's superbly crafted portrait of a Tokyo underclass family
Film / Fantasy
Johnny Depp and Jude Law join the cast for episode two of the Potter prequel series
Film / Documentary
Jaw-dropping documentary about a set of identical triplets who were separated at birth
Film / Drama
Mr. Robot star Rami Malek wears the Freddie Mercury teeth in this long-gestating Queen flick
Film / Comedy
Fourth film in Debbie Isitt's critic-proof Nativity film series
Film / Comedy
Robert Redford's screen swansong: a codger true-crime comedy
Film / Action
Taron Egerton gets to do the outlaw thing in this "gritty reimagining"
Film / Family
Disney's lavish 'reimagining' of the ETA Hoffman story and Tchaikovsky ballet
Film / Horror
Possessed corpse runs amok in morgue in 'exorcism gone wrong' horror
Film / Thriller
Steve McQueen adapts Lynda La Plante's female heist thriller
Film / Drama
Mike Leigh's epic Peterloo Massacre drama
Film / Comedy
Mega-hit no-budget Japanese zombie comedy
Film / Action
Ground-breaking action comedy screened in Come the Revolution's No B/S series
Film / Art House
Russian ballerina develops a taste for modern dance in arthouse hoofing drama
Film / Family
Emily Blunt assumes creepy levitating sprog-wrangler duties in belated Disney sequel
Film / Comedy
Charlie Chaplin's penultimate movie opens Slapstick 2019
Film / Comedy
Chaplin's The Pilgrim precedes discussion on whether religion is fair game for comedy
Film / Comedy
Lucy Porter celebrates the newly restored work of this early silent comedy star
Film / Comedy
An early example of Russian socialist slapstick, once banned for its anti-Bolshevik humour
Film / Comedy
Harold Lloyd comedy classic plus shorts screened amid the grandeur of Bristol Cathedral
Film / Art House
Four hours with four people living dead-end lives in a nondescript Chinese city
Film / Drama
Bizarro Christian surfer flick that's been compared to The Room
