What to watch this Christmas | December at the movies

Christmas means many different things to many different people of all ages, shapes and sizes. Mostly, it means enduring Christmas carols, rampant shopping (or excitement, depending on which end of the consumerist stick you find yourself on/how old you are) and the expectation of what present will land in your lap this particular season and what the year ahead has in store.

(For some, of course, it's also a very significant religious festival, and I want to spare these people tabloid-magazine snark, so I'll just commend them and leave it at that.)

But to paraphrase Inglourious Basterds's Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), for film fans Christmas means "one thing... and one thing only": The Hobbit.

Specifically, Christmas 2013 means The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the sequel to last year's 'An Unexpected Journey'. It'll be the second in a planned three-part series concluding in 2014 with 'There and Back Again' (just assumed that all the films will be prefixed with 'The Hobbit:'...).

Running chronologically prior to the world-famous Lord of the Rings trilogy - filmed to great acclaim and profit in the early noughties and sourced from novels by JRR Tolkien - The Hobbit was a slim volume the professorial Tolkien penned for the benefit of his children. Peter Jackson, returning to Tolkien's world after his successful run with the 'Rings' trilogy, controversially expanded Tolkien's comparatively light fairy tale into another stomping, three-part, three-hours-each cinematic epic.

As if that weren't enough to shock the source material's cosy confines, Jackson also took a leaf from his fellow blockbuster-general James Cameron by giving us not just a film, but a film shot through with 'groundbreaking technology': in this case, speeding things up to 48-frames-per second - a move which received a mixed reaction. Which was disheartening, as the very idea that such a beloved franchise would give way to anything but the most raucous enthusiasm from its rabid international fan base is a bit deflating, to say the least.

Granted, 'An Unexpected Journey' was hardly the entire-generation crushing disappointment that Star Wars: Episode I - A Phantom Menace was back in 1999 - when many a geek suffered an existential conniption upon realising that nerd-messiah George Lucas was something of a Wizard of Oz in retrospect - but it did force us to entertain the upsetting notion that Jackson will never quite recapture the magic of the original Lord of the Rings saga.

That said, 'Desolation' is set to up the ante - as it'll be expanding on the source novel's action-packed middle section - as we'll finally see (and, crucially, hear) more of the Benedict Cumberbatch-voiced titular dragon, Smaug. 'Rings regular Legolas (Orlando Bloom) will also be popping in, along with a not-in-the-book addition, Tauriel (Evangeline Lily)... which could go either way.

While genre-fans can be left to bask in the glow of this slice of Tolkeniana (along with last month's, ahem, incendiary sequel to The Hunger Games), their more nostalgic counterparts are being invited to see their former hero - Harry Potter - in a new light, as the boy wizard (Daniel Radcliffe) will refashion himself to play another kind of icon: the Beat-generation poet Allen Ginsberg, in the promising true-story historical drama Kill Your Darlings.

Based on an intriguing bit early biography for the cadre of poets in question - Ginsberg, along with Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) chronicled and helped define 1950s American counter-culture - John Krokidas's film focuses on a campus-murder that brought the generation-defining scribes together. Co-starring Micheal C. Hall ('Dexter' himself) and up-and-comers Dane DeHaan (The Place Beyond the Pines) and Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire), if played right, this thriller could be the first genuinely gripping, non-sentimental take on the Beat generation to grace the silver screen.

As it happens, 'Darlings' won't be the only slice of recent American history in cinemas this month. American Hustle will take us to the sparkly-and-sleazy 1980s to tell the (once again, true) story of a con man and his partner-in-crime wife, who are forced to work with the FBI to bust a mafia crime ring. David O. Russell - briefly a persona non-grata in Hollywood by dint of his diva-esque on-set histrionics - directs an ensemble who have become his regulars since his comeback: Christian Bale and Amy Adams (The Fighter), Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper (The Silver Linings Playbook).

Along with the Martin Scorcese-directed, Leonardo di Caprio-starring The Wolf of Wall Street, Hustle will undoubtedly lead to plenty of Phd dissertations being clacked away at universities across the world. Dissertations which would ask questions like: 'Why is it that, as we enter into the second decade of the 21st century, did Hollywood feel the need to re-examine the American condition so obsessively?'

Though it's not all culturally-relevant awards-bait. This month we can also look forward to Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, a sequel to the hugely popular 2004 television broadcasting farce, which was a defining film for eminently bankable American funnyman Will Farrel. Though it may boast the period trappings of its cinematic neighbours this season - the era in question being the 70s - it's highly unlikely that Adam McKay-directed, Judd Apatow-produced inevitable hit will have the same clout as its predecessor.

Which is fine. After all, it is Christmas.

PAST PERFECT

Batman Returns (1992)

Forget about It's a Wonderful Life or any of the countless iterations of A Christmas Carol.

Batman Returns is the Christmas film you want to pop into your DVD player this year.

Here's why.

Tim Burton's sequel to the hugely popular original - simply titled 'Batman' and once again featuring Michael Keaton in the titular role - is the only Batman film in the franchise that takes on the core absurdity of the DC Comics character and runs with it.

But it doesn't run with it in the same way that Burton's successor Joel Schumacher ran with it; turning it into a camp carnival of steel bat-nipples and shiny gadgets and architecture. In pitting Bruce Wayne/Batman against the double-menace of feral jewel thief Selina Kyle/Catwoman (the never-sexier Michelle Pfeiffer) and the orphaned freak-cum-underground mobster Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin (the never-uglier Danny De Vito), Burton showed that he understood the inner workings of Batman and his rogues' gallery.

It's about watching mad people in costumes tearing each other apart (which is as far as you can get from the moralistic, dead-serious drama-thrillers of the latter-day Christopher Nolan trilogy).

The snowy pall of Christmas time over Gotham city only reinforces the stylistically-heightened panorama: a truly gothic sight if there ever was one, and a more than apt rehearsal for that other Burton-sponsored classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas.