12 of the best films to watch this December

From a steamy age-gap thriller starring Nicole Kidman to a Bob Dylan biopic featuring Timothée Chalamet, these are the films to stream and watch at the cinema this month.

Beatles '64

It was in February 1964 that the US succumbed to Beatlemania. The Fab Four spent three weeks in the country that had influenced them so much, and their visit included an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which was seen by 73 million people, as well as their first US concert in Washington DC. Beatles '64 is an intimate chronicle of those whirlwind weeks, produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by David Tedeschi. There are new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with such peers as Smokey Robinson and Ronnie Spector (who died in 2022), but the film's main attraction is the rarely seen footage shot at the time by two legendary documentary-makers, Albert and David Maysles. "The Maysles brothers were pioneers of direct cinema, as they called it," Tedeschi said in Rolling Stone. "In that footage, you can see that the Beatles are very relaxed. They have so much charisma on camera. But even the fans, these young women in front of the Plaza Hotel, or what we call the Sullivan Theater now – they also have so much charisma. There's something about the energy of Al and David that relaxed people, and allowed them to project something on film."

Released on 29 November on Disney+

Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche starred in The English Patient together in 1996, and they're reunited in The Return, another epic drama about the mental and physical scars left by warfare. Co-written and directed by Uberto Pasolini, this swords-and-sandals saga is based on the last section of Homer's The Odyssey, in which Odysseus (Fiennes) comes back to Ithaca after a decade of battling Trojans and another decade of battling giant monsters. His patient wife Penelope (Binoche) has been busy fending off the many suitors who are keen to claim his fortune, but Odysseus may be too badly bruised to step in before it's too late. "It's gritty and dirty and eventually smeared with blood, but it takes its time and weighs every word," says Steve Pond in The Wrap. "Fiennes is magnificent as Odysseus, his face a map of troubles and his voice a virtuoso instrument."

Released on 6 December in the US

Robbie Williams found fame as a member of a British boy band, Take That, before becoming a phenomenally successful but scandal-prone solo artist. He's an ideal candidate, then, for a pop-star biopic. But Better Man, directed by Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman), is more distinctive than that might suggest. Not only is it unusually open about Williams's flaws, it features one bold and bizarre innovation: Williams himself is represented as a CGI chimpanzee, as played by Jonno Davies in a performance-capture bodysuit. "The result is a film that feels grandiose, outrageous, deeply personal and joltingly relatable," says Kristy Puchko in Mashable. "It's Billy Elliot meets Rocketman meets Planet of the Apes. And it's so much more. Rich in vibrant emotion, body-rocking musical numbers, daring performances and a scorching tenderness, Better Man more than rocks. It rules."

Released on 25 December in the US and Sweden, and on 26 December in the UK, Ireland and Australia

Adapted from Rachel Yoder's novel, and directed by Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), the boldly titled Nightbitch is a horror comedy that stars Amy Adams as the exhausted and exasperated stay-at-home mother of an infant son. She feels that she has lost her identity as an artist, she doesn't fit in with her fellow suburban mothers and her husband (Scoot McNairy) doesn't appreciate what she is going through. It's at this point that the film shifts from observational comedy to twisted body horror: she believes that she is growing fur and fangs, and turning into a dog. "Adams is having a blast as the mother, taking centre stage with renewed energy and vigour," says Jourdain Searles in Little White Lies. "McNairy is in top comedic form as the clueless husband who thinks of raising his own son as babysitting. There's no denying the universal truths behind the narrative… Nightbitch is about a mother's need to be free."

Released on 6 December in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland

Last year, Dimitri Rassam's French production company, Chapter 2, released two lavish epics adapted from Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers. As if that weren't enough, the company has now completed another Dumas adaptation, a three-hour romp through his classic novel of vengeance, disguise and swashbuckling swordplay, The Count of Monte-Cristo. Pierre Niney stars as Edmond Dantès, a young sailor who is wrongly accused of treason in the early 19th Century. He is locked in an island prison for years, but a fellow inmate tells him of a secret stash of treasure, and he eventually enacts his meticulous revenge. This "masterful adaptation stands as one of the best renditions of Dumas' work to date, says Linda Marric in HeyUGuys. "Every twist and turn of the plot is delivered with maximum impact, [but] the film's takeaway is a haunting reflection on the cost of revenge and the perils of letting obsession dictate one's life."

Released on 20 December in the US

It's been a relatively quiet year for superhero films, but there have already been two set in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, ie they revolve around supporting characters from Marvel's Spider-Man comics, but they don't feature Spidey himself. Neither Madame Web nor Venom: The Last Dance was exactly a triumph, mind you, but maybe this year's third SSMU film, Kraven the Hunter, will hit the mark. Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as a Russian big-game hunter with enhanced strength and heightened senses. Ariana DeBose is his love interest, Russell Crowe is his gangster father, and Alessandro Nivola is another Spider-Man villain, the Rhino. More intriguingly, the director, JC Chandor, is known for downbeat dramas (Margin Call, All is Lost, A Most Violent Year), and he has suggested that Kraven the Hunter will be another of those. "Sony probably doesn't want me to lead with this," Chandor said in Esquire, "but the story is a tragedy. When the final credits roll on this film, if you've been paying attention, you won't have the feeling that this is all going to end great."

Released on 12 December in cinemas internationally

A decade on from the last big-screen Tolkien adaptation – Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies – it's time for another film set in Middle Earth. Jackson is the executive producer, and his usual co-writer, Philippa Boyens, is the producer. But The War of the Rohirrim is different from their previous work. Set two centuries before Jackson's films, it takes its story from an appendix at the end of Tolkien's novel, so its main characters haven't been seen on screen before. It also has a Japanese director, Kenji Kamiyama, who has made a cartoon in the Japanese anime style. "When they suggested anime, that's when my brain really started whirring," Boyens said in Entertainment Weekly. "Immediately, the idea of telling this story came to me… I felt that it would work for anime because it's so character-based and also contained within its own world. It speaks to certain things that work really well with Japanese storytelling." 

Released on 11 December in cinemas internationally

The Lion King has been a massive hit as a cartoon, a stage musical and a photorealistic remake of the cartoon, and now the franchise comes roaring back with Mufasa: The Lion King, which is a prequel to the photorealistic remake. It tells the tale of how Simba's orphaned father, Mufasa, made his perilous journey to the Pride Lands, soundtracked with new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The most surprising part of the film is its director, Barry Jenkins, who is best known for his Oscar-winning drama, Moonlight. He has been criticised for taking on a Disney prequel, but he has said that Jeff Nathanson's script convinced him that the project was right for him. "I found the story incredibly moving," Jenkins said in The New York Times. "There's this character who we know of as inherently great or inherently royal, and we get to really go in and explore how this person came to be. We're also looking at what makes some people good and others evil, and how people aren't fundamentally one or the other."

Released on 18 December in cinemas internationally

FW Murnau's unofficial Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu, came out more than a 100 years ago, but it still stands as cinema's creepiest ever vampire film. Robert Eggers, the director of The Witch and The Lighthouse, is such an obsessive fan of the film that he staged it as a school play when he was 17 years old, and now he's written and directed his own remake starring Bill Skarsgård as the undead Count Orlok, Nicholas Hoult as the hapless estate agent who visits him at his Transylvanian castle, Lily-Rose Depp as the woman who falls under Orlok's spell and Willem Dafoe as an expert on vampire lore. Eggers told Anthony Breznican in Vanity Fair that his Nosferatu boasts an authentic 19th-Century setting – and an authentic 19th-Century vampire, too. "This Orlok is more of a folk vampire than any other film version. That means he's a dead person... For the first time in a Dracula or Nosferatu story, this guy looks like a dead Transylvanian nobleman. Every single thing he's wearing down to the heels on his shoes is what he would've worn. That's never been done."

Released on 25 December in the US, Canada, Mexico and Spain

Several intertwining stories set over a picture-perfect festive season in England? A bashful boy who gets tongue-tied in front of the girl he adores? That Christmas may be a cartoon, but it's easy to guess that it was co-written by Richard Curtis, the romantic softy who scripted and directed Love Actually. Inspired by three children's picture books, which were also written by Curtis, it's a cosy animation set in a quaint Suffolk seaside village. Santa Claus (voiced by Brian Cox) is coming to town, but a heavy snowfall there might stop the residents from spending the big day together. This "delightful holiday feature offers something for everyone, especially the people who get mushy about glossy stories about human connection," says Kate Erbland in IndieWire. "The old chestnuts hold true for this one, the goofy holiday puns: it's a gift well worth unwrapping and sharing with the ones you love most."

Released on 6 December on Netflix internationally

Bob Dylan has had such a long and trailblazing career that it would be impossible to sum up its twists and turns in one conventional biopic: when Todd Haynes made I'm Not There, he resorted to casting six different actors (including Cate Blanchett) to play him in six different storylines. James Mangold's approach in A Complete Unknown is to stick to Dylan's early years, in particular his rise to fame as a folk singer in New York's Greenwich Village, and his controversial pivot to electric guitar-driven rock'n'roll in 1965. Timothée Chalamet has the starring role, and is already being tipped for an Oscar nomination. "Oscar voters can't resist a biopic," says the BBC's Caryn James. "Consider this: A Complete Unknown was directed by James Mangold, who directed another awards-bait musical biopic, Walk the Line (2005). Reese Witherspoon won the best actress Oscar for her performance in that film as June Carter Cash and Joaquin Phoenix earned a best actor nomination as Johnny Cash. If nothing else, A Complete Unknown may well bring Chalamet his second nomination, after Call Me By Your Name."

Released on 25 December in the US

Writer-director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) takes the erotic thriller into the post-Me Too era with Babygirl, a film that brings complexity and realism to the kind of titillating premise that would have excited Adrian Lyne and Paul Verhoeven in the 1980s and 1990s. Nicole Kidman's character is the much-admired CEO of a New York tech firm, not to mention the glamorous wife of a feted theatre director (Antonio Banderas). But she has secret, unfulfilled desires which are awakened by a slippery young intern played by Harris Dickinson. Will she risk everything by embarking on an affair with an employee who's half her age? "Rarely is that workplace taboo as scintillating as it is in Babygirl, a captivating psychological drama," says Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. "It's hard to imagine audiences being more glued to another movie this year, so sexy and stirring the story is from start to finish."

Released on 25 December in the US

Source: BBC