The Bachelor Pad
Ready to do anything to get a promotion, CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) doesn't hesitate to give his apartment to his superiors so that they can receive their mistresses. The deal takes a completely different turn the day his boss Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) brings back Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the office elevator operator, with whom he is completely obsessed. He saves her life on Christmas Eve when she tries to commit suicide out of love for Sheldrake, who will never divorce for her. After many adventures, we find Baxter and Fran, at New Year's Eve, playing cards and ready for a new start. Shut up and Deal, Fran's famous line that announces the end of Billy Wilder's masterpiece (directed in 1960 and winner of five Oscars, including the Oscar for Best Picture) and the beginning of a new love.
The Poseidon Adventure While the passengers of the Poseidon, a luxury liner bound for Athens, celebrate the New Year, a gigantic tidal wave turns the party into a fight for survival. Reverend Frank Scott (Gene Hackman) takes the disaster into his own hands and attempts to direct the survivors to the stern of the ship on the surface of the water.
Made in 1972, Ronald Neame's The Poseidon Adventure is adapted from a novel by Paul Gallico who was inspired by a traumatic memory during a cruise aboard the Queen Mary. Carried by a five-star cast - Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters - this disaster film remains a jewel of the genre.
Strange DaysLos Angeles. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a former disgraced LAPD cop, has turned to trafficking ultra-sophisticated videos that allow you to relive the past by proxy. The discovery of a video revealing a crime plunges him into a conspiratorial and extremely dangerous world.
Co-written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, Strange Days, a cyberpunk thriller by Kathryn Bigelow, takes place a few days before the turn of the millennium. The final sequence in which the last minutes of 1999 sound the death knell of a faltering world is a pure moment of great cinema.
The SubstanceElisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a shooting star of cinema, has turned to TV-style aerobics. On her 50th birthday, she is fired from her job because of her age. But there is an alternative to aging: "the substance", an elixir of youth whose dosage does not allow any slippage...Winner of the Screenplay Prize at the last Cannes Film Festival, The Substance by Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) is the horrific slap of the year 2024, filled with cinephile quotes, from Cronenberg to De Palma with a judicious passage through the cinema of origins (Freaks by Tod Browning, 1932). The merciless race towards eternal youth, "a better version of oneself" dictated by a cruel social injunction, will end on New Year's Eve in an absolutely jubilant organic and gory show.
