Movies are nostalgic for themselves, an understandable feeling that weaves its way between timid signs of recovery and the many Santa Claus and reindeer titles, the once-sinepanettoni that now flood platforms long before the holidays, because even movies follow the rhythm of Black Friday shopping and the age of streaming .

Nostalgia, however, is serious, avant-garde and not second-hand, and in fact it lies in its exaggeration. Great movie by Steven Spielberg Fabelmans (since December 22), where the director between truth and fiction traces his sentimental education in cinema. Spielberg’s teenage alter ego, Sammy Fabelman, growing up in post-war Arizona, discovers the fatal power of films, the first camera, the ability to remake at home, as if by magic, the scenes that impressed him in the theater. This is a film that has dreams, redemption and even pain when, in the darkness of his small room, a little boy discovers in a stolen still image the forbidden secret of his mother, the dreamy and unsuspecting Michelle Williams.

Cinema reveals what was hidden at first sight, reveals, exposes and allows you to bring reality into line, even one that we do not want. It will end nicely with the arrival of Sammy / Steven in Hollywood and a meeting with a filmmaker who will teach him to direct his gaze to the horizon so as not to miss a frame, and most importantly, life. A very personal hymn to the saving power of films, Fabelmans kicks off a season of gorgeous, ferocious, touching time travel movies.

He will arrive in January Babylon Academy Award winner Damien Chazelle with Margot Robbie and Brad Pitta daring saga of the dissolute years of silent cinema and the fall of the gods at the appearance of sound, the very nostalgia that seems to portend New film by Saverio Costanzo Finally dawn with Hollywood on the Tiber in the 1950s seen through the eyes of a girl trying to audition at Cinecitta, amid the glittering backdrops of mythological films.

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Of equal ingenuity and melancholy, an amazing Christmas short film (34 minutes) produced by Alfonso Cuarón and directed by our Alice Rohrwacher, Students, on Disney+ from December 16th. Inspired by a letter of good wishes that Elsa Morante sent to critics Goffredo Fofi, the film with Alba Rohrwacher, a very strict nun, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, a wealthy lady in love, is set during World War II in an orphanage where foster children, without their parents, spend Christmas uncomplainingly , depicting the little angels that poor believers turn to on the night of Advent to fulfill their vows: the radio tempts them with a forbidden song, Ba Ba Kiss me baby and at the top of their desires is a huge trinket given by a wealthy lady. With pupils wide open from hunger, orphan girls learn the price of rebellion. An easy but not easy parable, between religious fears and childhood upheavals, a little magic that can be seen all together between Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner, the exact time, sacred and perhaps lost, of the film.