By Mike Thatcher

Season’s greetings to you all from the team, we hope that you get your fill of Christmas films over the holidays. ‘Arthur Christmas’ seems to have become the traditional watch in our household; there’s no accounting for taste. Members should have already received the new programme and it is available to see online and around the village.

We start on Thursday 12th January at 8pm with The Farewell (PG). This gentle and touching Japanese f ilm opens with the caption: ‘Based on an actual lie,’ and illustrates how different cultures approach mortality and grief. A headstrong Chinese-American student Billie (played brilliantly by Awkafina) returns to China after her grandmother is given a terminal diagnosis. An impromptu wedding is arranged so that the family can gather together to see her one more time. Despite the strong themes, it is a warm and often funny family portrayal, with a dynamite performance from Zhao Shuzhen as the spirited grandmother.

NT live returns on Thursday 26th at 7pm with The Crucible (12A) by Arthur Miller.
A witch hunt is beginning in Arthur Miller’s captivating parable of power with Erin Doherty (The Crown) and Brendan Cowell (Yerma).

Then the simply amazing My Life as a Courgette (PG) on Friday 27th January at 8pm. Despite being just over an hour, this moving stop-frame animation certainly does not leave you feeling short-changed. Told from the perspective of the children in an orphanage, its strength is that it is not childlike in any way. After his mother’s death, Courgette is befriended by a police officer, who with his new friends help him adjust to live in the orphanage. So much emotion is transmitted through the big eyes of all the characters in this wonderful, funny and sad film, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

We finish with Operation Mincemeat (12A) on Sunday 29th January at 3pm. In 1943, two British intelligence officers concoct Operation Mincemeat, dropping a corpse with false papers off the coast of Spain, hoping to fool Nazi spies into believing the Allied forces were planning to attack by way of Greece rather than Sicily.