New Year's Eve (2011)

Garry Marshall's second holiday mosaic arrives with more than two dozen recognizable faces and hands each of them roughly one emotion. The premise, that New Yorkers on December 31 might briefly intersect, permits a structure in which nobody carries the film for longer than four minutes. It is a casting spreadsheet rendered as cinema, and the spreadsheet is broader than 2011 typically allowed: Halle Berry, Ludacris, Héctor Elizondo, Sofía Vergara. The film never acknowledges this, which is the point. The diversity is a headcount, not a thesis, and no scene asks us to consider what any of it means.

A woman does run the Times Square Alliance, and Hilary Swank plays her with the grim efficiency of a mid-level bureaucrat, but no argument is made about it. She is competent because the plot requires a competent person, and the closing image of her weeping on a hospital roof beside her dying father is sentiment, not critique. Elsewhere, two couples race for a hospital's New Year's Day baby bonus, and the resolution, in which one pair lies so the other can collect the check, is offered as warmth. Nobody here organizes, protests, or interrogates a system. The cash prize is a plot device with a heartbeat.

There is no queer thread, no body politics, no neurodivergent character, no climate anxiety, no reconsideration of history. The film's cultural residue is a faint smudge of demographic inclusiveness that evaporates the moment the credits roll, and even that feels accidental. The rest is a different sort of sermon: that midnight matters. Critics were unkind. Roger Ebert called it a dreary plod through cinematic sludge, and the Razzies nominated it five times. It opened at number one anyway, which tells us something about December 31 that the film never manages to articulate. A harmless vintage, and a thin one.