A New Year's Eve movie on New Year's Eve, and deja 287

New Year's Eve isn't the type of holiday that pairs with movies. If you were to sit down and try to think of five movies where the plot revolves significantly around December 31st, you'd be hard-pressed to do it. They exist, but they haven't entered into the hallowed realm of the classics, the type you'd throw on every December 31st.

Oh you can think of movies that have a scene on New Year's Eve. Especially this year you might be thinking of When Harry Met Sally, where "Auld Lang Syne" is playing over Harry and Sally's ultimate reconciliation. But that doesn't mean you would watch the entire When Harry Met Sally just to ring in the new year, when that's only five minutes of the whole movie. 

Just off the top of my head, the movie 200 Cigarettes takes place on New Year's Eve, at least I think -- but the fact that this was the second movie I thought of is certainly saying something. (Although that movie's release year, 1999, is something that will come up in just a minute -- twice, in fact.) 

Given that we do, as a culture, love New Year's Eve, the lack of movies celebrating it seems a bit counterintuitive. Then again, maybe it's more intuitive than you think, especially if you look at the business model of movies. 

The idea with any movie about any holiday is that you release it just before that holiday -- or, in the case of Christmas movies, maybe as long as two months before that holiday. For New Year's Eve, Christmas is already rudely grabbing most of that available release space. Sure you could release a New Year's Eve movie on, say, December 15th, but the audience does not want to skip over Christmas, which has not yet occurred, in order to land in the headspace necessary to celebrate New Year's. As the intensity of Christmas anticipation increases, that's right when you're trying to get your audience for your newly released New Year's movie. In short, New Year's does not have a "season" like other big holidays do. 

Sure, you could also release it a few days before New Year's. I like to say that Christmas is over at 2:30 in the afternoon on Christmas Day, and I'm only a little bit joking. But setting aside Christmas movies, late December is also the time when all the newly released Oscar hopefuls are upon us. Your little movie about New Year's Eve doesn't stand a chance.

Which is maybe why Nicholas Clifford's One More Shot -- which we watched last night here in Australia, finishing at about 10:45 -- was released on October 12th, having made its South by Southwest debut back in March. I mean, I suppose that's better than releasing it in June, but you can't really say that a tie-in with the holiday was really intended on that date. Not only was there still Christmas to get through, but there was still Halloween.

I started to watch One More Shot, on our Australian streaming service Stan, right around that time, before I paused around the ten-minute mark. I realized this would be a great thing for my wife and me to watch on New Year's Eve, when we usually want to watch something vaguely festive, but can never fit it directly into the theme of the holiday. (On one recent occasion, we watched Murder Mystery 2, and I knew we could do a lot better than that.)

Because the film is Australian, starring Australian acting exports Emily Browning and Ashley Zukerman, that also seemed to make it a bit more fun for our early Australian celebration of New Year's. 

Interestingly, due to the film's long gestation, my wife had already read the script, since she used to work at a body that gives funding to Australian films. But that didn't lessen her interest in watching it, and we both had a good time with it. 

In case it's something you might still consider getting in for your own New Year's Eve at home -- assuming you aren't young enough to go out and do something fun -- I'll give you a little bit of the premise. Browning plays Minnie, a woman in her mid-thirties whose life isn't in order, but she's hoping to pick up with an ex, Joe (Sean Keenan), at a party to celebrate rolling into the year 2000. She wasn't going to go after she saw a different ex earlier that day at the hospital where she works, whose wife was about to give birth to their first baby, but hearing that Joe has returned from New York, she throws on a red party dress at the last minute and joins her lesbian friends on whose couch she's surfing. It's a costume party, and asked who she's going as, she says "Friends," as in the TV show. Which friend? "All of them."

Of course, Joe is not as available as she might have hoped, and this evening is going to go through one crisis after another -- made possible by the fact that Emily has a magical body of tequila procured for her by some of these friends on a trip to Mexico ten years earlier. Each time she takes a swig, it resets her to that moment when she took her first swig outside the front door of the party. As Y2K looms and they are all concerned if it will be the end of the world, Minnie gets a chance to keep resetting and trying to get it right this time.

The premise works, the movie is funny, the 1990s needle drops are delightful, and the characters are developed enough to get a real sense of them as friends. It builds in depth and complexity from a gimmick that could be fairly superficial. It's also nice to see Browning, who once had a promising Hollywood career in front of her, resurface in something. I wouldn't have seen her in anything since Alex Ross Perry's Golden Exits in 2017.

It was interesting to watch a final movie of 2025 that deals in some way with deja vu, because 2025 ended up being quite the deja vu of 2024 -- in one way and one way only, which I am about to tell you about. 

You know I watch a lot of new-to-me movies each year, but that total falls within a range of 40 or more movies just due to the randomness of the way things work out. Some years I might see more movies I've already seen, like in 2022, when I rewatched all my previous #1 films. Some years I might get busy with other things and not get to as many movies. Some years -- though not in ten years now -- I might curate films for a film festival, and watch way more than I usually do. 

So I think you'll agree that it's unusual that after 365 days on the calendar in which to watch movies, I would end up with the exact same total of new-to-me movies in two years in a row.

But One More Shot was my 287th and final new-to-me movie of the calendar year 2025, just as The Brutalist was my 287th and final new-to-me movie of the calendar year 2024. 

(Yes, in 2024 I actually had 366 days to watch these movies, so I guess the per-day rate is not exactly equal.)

I was all set to come up short here, and that would have been my preference. But in the last few days, I had to watch three movies that related to finishing up my December viewing goals, before I even got to One Last Shot:

1) Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe on December 29th. I was supposed to be watching the 2000 version of Fail-Safe for a movie challenge, but I had never seen the original, so I wanted to watch that first. And glad I did, because I loved it, and also because it allowed me to listen to a podcast that discusses it in conjunction with Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite.

2) But then I couldn't find the 2000 version. So on the afternoon of December 30th I had to pivot to a different movie to complete the challenge, Josef Rusnak's 1999 film (there's that year again) The Thirteenth Floor. 

3) And then for reasons that are not very good -- I wanted to finish Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation before the calendar flipped to January -- I watched the 1981 Tobe Hooper The Funhouse, the last movie Tarantino discusses in detail in that book, on the evening of December 30th. 

And watching the exact same number of movies, two years in a row, was useful because it allowed me to tack on a second half of this post, if nothing else.

If you're reading this on December 31st in your time zone, happy new year.