BY KAREN KEMMERLE |

Have a Cinematic New Year’s Eve

Ring in the New Year with a glass of champagne (or sparkling cider!) and an appropriately themed movie.

Have a Cinematic New Year’s Eve

Want to set the tone for a great year of movies? Easy. Ring in 2015 with one or more of these movies that all take place on New Year’s Eve (sort of).

Before you ask, we purposefully left out obvious choices like The Godfather Part II, Sunset Boulevard and 200 Cigarettes. Broaden your horizons in the New Year!

The Apartment

Kick off your movie marathon with Billy Wilder’s tale of a lonely insurance salesman (Jack Lemmon) who gets promotions at work by allowing his bosses to carry on their martial indiscretions in his apartment. Things get complicated when one of the other women is a girl he has his eye on (Shirley MacLaine). Of course New Year’s Eve brings the couple together as they embark on the most romantic game of gin rummy in cinema history.

Radio Days

Woody Allen’s underrated Radio Days explores radio’s golden age through the eyes of one ordinary New York family and the performers and musicians that dominated the air waves. Allen offers his audience two contrasting New Year’s Eve parties: one in glamourous Manhattan and one in a small, but warm, home in Queens. Bonus: Diane Keaton sings “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To” at the swanky, uptown affair.

When Harry Met Sally

Okay, we said we were leaving off the classics, but Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally is required New Year’s Eve viewing. Penned by the legendary Nora Ephron, the film’s iconic closing sequence begins with Harry (Billy Crystal) running through the streets of NYC to confess his love to Sally (Meg Ryan) at a New Year’s Eve party.  Watch this one with the person who is the last person you want to talk to before you go to sleep at night.

Four Rooms

This New Year's Eve anthology film truly has something for everyone! It features not one, but four very different end of the year celebrations from writer/directors Alison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino! Tim Roth turns in a dynamite performance as Ted the Bellboy who serves as the connecting thread between the four stories and grows increasingly unhinged as the night progresses.

Strange Days

Set in the last days of the old millennium, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days is an underrated gem that features a climactic New Year's Eve soiree at the posh Bonaventure Hotel that bleeds on to the streets of a futuristic L.A. Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Lewis, Angela Bassett, Tom Sizemore and Vincent D'Onofrio appear to be having the time of their lives in this genre-bending sci-fi thriller.

Money Train

Did you know Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson appeared together in a movie after White Men Can’t Jump? The dynamic duo reunited in the hilarious (and underappreciated) Money Train as two cops,  raised together in foster care, who  foil a subway madman. When Harrelson’s Charlie decide to rob the money train (carrying all the subway fare) to pay his gambling debts on New Year’s Eve, Snipes’ John must stop him before he makes the biggest mistake of his life. 

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