December 12-18, 2025

Hello, friends!  

I’ll be taking a break for a few weeks from my newsletter for the holidays starting today, but I’ll see you again on these pages in the new year. In the meantime, I think you will enjoy the cinematic treats we have on our screens, including crowd-pleasers like Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery and Eternity; awards season favorites like  Hamnet and Sentimental Value; thought-provoking historical dramas like Nuremberg; warmly uplifting concert films like You Got Gold: A Celebration of John Prine; and holiday classics like Home Alone, Elf, Die Hard, and White Christmas, the latter of which will be playing on Christmas Eve. 

This Christmas Eve, we’ll also open two of the most talked-about films of the year, Marty Supreme, starring Timothee Chalamet, and Song Song Blue, starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson. Marty Supreme is a phenomenally entertaining caper of a film with an unscrupulous self-promoting huckster at its center, a sort of American Dream story, where the dreamer dreams of table tennis glory and doesn’t mind if he steps on a few toes along the way. Song Song Blue is, for me, this year’s crowd-pleaser, a stranger-that-fiction true life story of a Neil Diamond tribute duo based in Milwaukee, who won the hearts of all who heard them. The open-hearted depiction of the duo by way of the wonderful performances from Jackson and Hudson will be winning over cinema audiences, too. 

I’m also very excited about all the terrific movies that will finally be released early in 2026, many of which have made my “Best of 2025” list, and which I am planning on booking for the Pickford in the new year, pending confirmations. 

These include films like

No Other Choice, Park Chan Wook’s, provocative, farcical, and profound new film

Is This Thing On?, Bradley Cooper’s newest directorial feature, with movingly strong performances from Laura Dern and Will Arnett 

The Choral, a beautiful historical drama about a small Yorkshire town in 1916, determined to put on a community chorus before the town’s remaining young men are shipped off to the War

The Testament of Ann Lee, directed by Mona Fastvold (co-writer of The Brutalist), detailing the life of the founder of the Shaker movement and featuring a transcendent performance from Amanda Seyfried. 

So many great films to look forward to. 

Happy holidays, and we’ll see you at the movies, friends! 

Melissa