It’s New Year’s Eve, the one night a year when otherwise commonplace parties take on a slightly desperate significance, a need to succeed. You have to set the tone for the year ahead, and warm prosecco on an emptying dancefloor doesn’t bode well for anyone. This degree of pressure sets up almost any celebration to fail – though a bad party can launch as many formative memories as a good one. Look at the movies where parties pave the way for swooning romantic connection, social catastrophe or the end of the world: with the help of a few drinks, any drama speeds up.
It’s a New Year’s Eve party, specifically, that finally brings closure to the will-they-won’t-they relationship dance that keeps Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally so sparklingly afloat. That single scene has made the film go-to 31 December viewing for anyone spending the night in. In George Cukor’s delicious 1938 romcom Holiday, a lavish, overpopulated New Year’s Eve party is what brings Katharine Hepburn’s headstrong heiress and Cary Grant’s starry-eyed striver together – in an old children’s playroom, away from the crowd.
Everyone is trying to escape everyone else, meanwhile, in Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (BBC iPlayer), Ben Wheatley’s caustically funny study of a dysfunctional family reuniting and disintegrating over the course of one elaborately planned but terminally gloomy NYE bash. Perhaps Wheatley’s best film, and certainly his most underappreciated, it’s a lesson in the spiralling tragedy that can emerge from organised gaiety.
There’s a similar level of venom spiking the drinks in Sally Potter’s simply titled The Party, but here tensions aren’t familial but professional. A messy dinner party held to celebrate the appointment of a new government minister (a fine, tart Kristin Scott Thomas) sees her Westminster dreams go up in flames. Consider Potter’s The Party the upper-crust counterpart to Mike Leigh’s immortal 1977 teleplay Abigail’s Party (Amazon Prime Video), in which a world of British class politics is laid bare by the wince-inducing social tensions and humiliations of a suburban drinks do. Even so, you’d probably rather accept that invitation than one to Festen (Viaplay). In Thomas Vinterberg’s brilliant acid-burn comedy, set around an embittered patriarch’s vicious 60th birthday bash, the ascetic, late-90s Dogme stylings have dated a little, but the writing remains fresh and lacerating.
If you prefer your party films more straightforwardly fun, look to the teen movie genre. An escapade about two black high-schoolers defying parental rule to host the mother of all bashes, Reginald Hudlin’s House Party was a huge American indie hit in the 90s on the strength of its goofy ebullience and fizzing hip-hop soundtrack. It still has more charm and bounce than this year’s already forgotten remake.
The 2007 smash Superbad owes something to its antic energy, and its tale of two pasty dorks setting out to party hard and lose their V-cards in turn preceded the likes of The Inbetweeners. Yet the berserk, wildly inflated Project X (2012) took the humble teen house party to an unprecedentedly grand scale. Its found-footage debauchery was akin to the blinked-out, champagne-fuelled set pieces of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, albeit not quite as well dressed. Beside it, the gawky coming-of-age socials of the winning 80s French crowdpleaser La Boum (starring a baby Sophie Marceau) look not just of another era, but another species.
For a quieter, more luxurious celebration – with a New Year’s Eve angle to boot – you can hardly do better than Babette’s Feast, Gabriel Axel’s candlelit touchstone of gastro cinema, in which each ravishing course at the titular banquet counts as a mini party in itself. But the buried gem of party-oriented films is Celts, a marvellous Serbian drama from 2021 in which a child’s birthday celebrations enable all manner of adult misbehaviour and spiky political ire, without killing the vibe.
Also new on streaming and DVD
The Miracle Club
(Lionsgate)
Reminiscent of the fuzzy, American-targeted Irish crowdpleasers of the 90s, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s perky period comedy about four working-class Dublin women on a pilgrimage to Lourdes is precision-tooled not to offend – unless you count some hobby Oirish accent work from a cast including Kathy Bates and Laura Linney – but there’s nothing much to remember either.
In Bed With Victoria
(Mubi)
If this year’s Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall introduced you to the gifts of writer-director Justine Triet, treat yourself to her delightful 2016 blend of romantic farce and courtroom drama, now given a spotlight on Mubi. Starring Virginie Efira as a Parisian criminal lawyer whose tricky casework and disastrous love life eventually collide, it gives a smart, spiky slant to old romcom tropes.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
(StudioCanal)
Rereleased on Blu-ray in a spiffy 4K restoration, Jim Jarmusch’s fleet-footed 1998 genre blend – fusing yakuza gangster cinema, deadpan comedy and zen character study – remains one of his most accessibly playful and rewarding films, thanks in large part to Forest Whitaker’s affecting, eccentric lead performance.
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