This film will soothe all festive family tensions

It's Christmas and you're stuffed to the brink, beat the potato bake-induced lethargy by streaming these films and tv shows,

It's Christmas and you're stuffed to the brink, beat the potato bake-induced lethargy by streaming these films and tv shows,

Big

Big is a classic in the cinema canon of “movies that aren’t technically Christmas movies but inexplicably feel like Christmas movies.” Something 7Flix must recognise, as they’re screening it on Christmas Day. I can’t think of a better accompaniment to potato bake-induced lethargy than Penny Marshall’s fuzzy 1988 body-switch comedy. A wide-eyed Tom Hanks is glorious and uninhibited in his performance as a 12-year-old boy that wakes up as a 35-year-old man after making a wish to be “big” on a Zoltan fortune-telling machine. It’s one of Hanks’ greatest-ever physical performance, his teenage guileless is totally believable (and a welcome palette cleanser from his schlocky, jowly role in Elvis.) 

Watch Big on 7Flix, Sunday 6:15pm

Paddington 2

Another not-Christmas film built for Christmas TV scheduling. How are we to resist the charms of the benevolent bear Paddington? Paul King’s miraculous little film is a rare sequel that’s better than its (excellent) original. In Paddington 2, our marmalade-loving, Peruvian refugee, still lodging with Mr. and Mrs. Brown (Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins), finds himself in a spot of legal trouble when he is (falsely!!!) accused of stealing a pop-up book and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The book was actually stolen by the treacherous, cravat-donning Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant in, no joke, a career-best performance), a fading actor and master of disguise, who frames poor Paddington for the crime. What does an innocent bear do when faced with a decade in the nick? Befriend his irascible inmates (Brendan Gleeson is Knuckles, the prison’s chef) and plot a daring escape, of course. This is a movie that is full of heart and full-bellied laughs — the perfect balm for any festive family tensions.

Watch Paddington 2 on ABC TV, Sunday, 4:12PM.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Daniel Craig’s drawling detective Benoît Blanc is back and, once again, poking his nose in the sinister business of the elites. Rian Johnson’s second, delectable whirl around the Knives Out universe is grander and more elaborate than the last. This time, the whodunnit unfurls on a weekend getaway with the worst people in the world. Miles Brohn (Edward Norton) is a reclusive an odious billionaire who invites the loathsome lot to a Greek island to solve “the mystery of my murder.” There’s Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) a Youtuber, and his much-younger lady Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn) an aspiring senator who is approving untested tech from fellow guest Lionel Touissant (Leslie Odom Jr.) in exchange for donor money; and Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) a scandal-prone model-turned-sweatband entrepreneur. The spanner in the works is Andi (Janelle Monáe), a former business partner of Brohn, who unsuccessfully sued him when she was sacked from the company. 

Watch Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery on Netflix

Atlanta

It is impossible to distill Donald Glover's mood-centric genre-defying Atlanta, there is nothing like it on television. At its bare bones, this comedy-slash-drama-slash-horror is a show about an aspiring manager and hopeless Princeton dropout Ernie (Glover), guiding his cousin Alfred ‘Paper Boi’ Miles (Brian Tyree Henry) through the grind of the rap industry whilst juggling a relationship with his on-and-off again girlfriend Van (Zazie Beetz) and their young daughter. But it’s so much more than that. Atlanta pays no heed to conventional storytelling, it will suck you into the drama only to disorientate you with a tangential and totally unrelated episode (in the first series, an is shot in the style of a fictional block television channel, fake commercials and all.) There are no rules in this surreal and dreamlike show, which Glover once described as “Twin Peaks with rappers.” 

Watch Atlanta on Binge

The Fallout

Jenna Ortega saved Netflix’s Addams Family reboot Wednesday from striking out. The stakes are high in Megan Park's directorial debut The Fallout, a film about the aftermath of a school shooting in which Ortega plays Vada, a once assidous and well-behaved teenager unravelling in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. During the shooting Vada finds herself hiding in the bathroom with fellow students Mia (Sia collaborator Maddie Ziegler) and Quinton (Niles Fitch). The film explores Vada’s intense, confusing and trauma-bonded relationship with the both of them. Park observes the teens with sensitivity and compassion as they try to cope by acting out through drugs, alcohol and sex — desperate to numb themselves, and feel it all at the same time. 

Watch The Fallout on Binge