If you want a five-star gift sure to top your favorite film freak's top-10 list, here's the place to start looking
In the wake of Covid-19, it’d be a gamble to take your sweetie to the best movies out right now this holiday season. Besides, as of November, only a few select theaters outside of the city are operating at 25 percent capacity. And since Dune has been delayed until next year, don’t risk it. Instead, consult our handy guide of gifts for movie lovers and create the perfect home theater experience for the little Kubrick in your life this Christmas in New York. Then you can fire up one of the best holiday movies in peace, knowing that you’ve got the final cut and all your cinephile’s film needs are met.
Even if you haven’t seen Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse, you can smell like you did with this mermaid-sculpted bar of soap, along with a flask of beard oil. (Joya, esteemed purveyors of fancy fragrant things, has created the set exclusively for distributor A24.) What can you expect from the scent? Per the site, it has notes of “sea foam, black waves, biblical storms and debauchery.” That sounds like a way better gift than socks.
$42 from A24
We’ve seen the new Godzilla movies—they’re fine. But don’t even step to the 1954 Japanese original, born out of a moment of postwar national trauma and shuddering with ecological warning. (It has to be a dude in a rubber suit because we are the monsters.) The Criterion Collection, wizards of deluxe home-viewing, give you eight Blu-rays full of city-stomping goodness: 15 features in all.
$179.96 from the Criterion Collection
Fresh or rotten—sometimes it’s hard to say, right? As if acknowledging as much, Rotten Tomatoes has published this immensely enjoyable anthology, filled with our favorite kind of advocacy: passionate defense of the weak. (Don’t even think of calling Step Brothers weak.) The ultimate mark of quality: Several former and current Time Out staffers contribute essays.
$24 from Running Press
Gorgeously designed and illustrated, this stack of 150 cards is designed to be adaptable to several different modes of play: six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style, speed-round-style, teams or solo. Like a happier version of Alien vs. Predator, whoever loses, everyone wins.
$25 from Cinephile
Are you talkin’ to me? As a matter of fact, Martin Scorsese is talking to you, if you enroll for his 30-session online seminar, presented by MasterClass. Even though you won’t be able to ask him to read your script for Taxi Driver 2: Electric Boogaloo, you will learn a lot about directing, editing and working with actors. Alas, there's no segment in which Scorsese weighs in on Marvel movies, but feel free to yell at your TV anyway.
$90 from MasterClass
Love ’80s hair metal? So do we. But wouldn’t it be good if passerby also knew that you were familiar with the work of Ingmar Bergman? Here’s your solution. IFC Center is the place to shop for these T-shirts, along with a line devoted to fierce females like Tilda Swinton. Represent.
$27 each at IFC Center. Available in S, M, L, XL and XXL.
Online streaming is increasingly the way we watch movies, and the selections at sites like Criterion Channel often make the experience phenomenal. But if horror is your thing—from spooky-old-house flicks to cult Italian gorefests—there’s only one game in town and that’s Shudder, programmed by genre experts. You could buy them Disney+, sure, but this one will undoubtedly result in greater happiness.
$49.99 for a year of total access
How much do we love Metrograph? We almost had our mail forwarded there during its Brian De Palma retrospective. If you’re any kind of self-respecting film fan living in NYC, you go there — or in Covid-19 times, you stream your movies from there. Support the mission with a digital membership, which gives you access to new Live Screening Events via livestream as well as members-only pre-show entertainment from special guests, plus an assortment of featured online content.
$5/month or $50/year from Metrograph.
