11 films to watch on this December 2022 

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Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have always written and directed critical dramas about social injustice. Yet, Tori and Lokita is "the angriest movie the Dardenne brothers have made", says David Ehrlich at IndieWire.

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Damien Chazelle's fascination with the brilliant age of Hollywood shone through his biggest film, La Land, yet the writer-director goes further in Babylon, a sprawling parody drama that gives the film business of the 1920s and 1930s the full Boogie Nights treatment.

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In the decade since her death in 2012, Whitney Houston has been the subject of a Nick Broomfield documentary, a Kevin Macdonald documentary and a television movie directed by Angela Bassett (who starred alongside Houston in Waiting to Exhale).

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The Beatles made it amazingly popular by naming an album after it. Driven Zeppelin's Jimmy Page played the guitar there on the title song of Goldfinger. John Williams conducted his score for Raiders of the Lost Ark there.

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Puss in Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) was a swashbuckling, sword swishing daredevil in the Shrek cartoons, and in his own performance film in 2011, however presently the feline Errol Flynn has spent eight of his nine lives.

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If you've at any point wanted to see Santa Claus snarling, "Time for a few season's beatings," and stabbing a baddie in the eye with a star-shaped ornament, then this is the year when your Christmas wish materializes.

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It's been 13 years since James Cameron's Avatar was released, yet at last it's time to get back to the planet Pandora, where Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) has been living with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and the remainder of the blue-skinned Navi.

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The "corsage" of the title doesn't allude to the blossoms pinned to a prom dress, yet the corsetry that presses Ruler Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) perpetually tightly. The year is 1877, and the Ruler has quite recently turned 40.

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Right now, directors love to make films that are blatantly about their own lives: Roma, The Fabelmans, Belfast, The Hand of God and The Souvenir are all part of the pattern. Presently Alejandro G Iñárritu is taking his turn.

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After two Bond movies and one all-action war thriller, 1917, Sam Mendes changes pace with a gentler, more personal task: Empire of Light is the first film he has scripted himself, without any co-writers.

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No one can tell what's going to happen at the Oscars, yet it would be a major bombshell if Brendan Fraser didn't snag a best actor nomination for his touching performance in The Whale, a chamber piece directed by Darren Aronofsky, and adapted from the play by Samuel D Tracker.

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