A year comes in and a year goes out… Vincente Minnelli’s heartwarming evergreen chronicles an ordinarily tumultuous year in the life of a prosperous household in 1904, when the worst prospect that faces them is a potential move to New York City. It’s frightening because it means change, and that’s inevitable – but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cherish what we share now, our past together. It’s debatable that MGM ever conjured a more affecting musical, and producer Arthur Freed, who headed their musical department, considered this one his personal favourite.
Tunes include The Trolley Song, The Boy Next Door, and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 15-minute introduction by a local film scholar and be followed by an audience talkback.
An unmissable big-screen experience.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
A movie that defines perfection, as it captures the spirit of hope and anxiety that informed the last years of the second world war, when it was made. It’s a film whose four parts cover the seasons from summer to spring but is truly a film for all seasons and all time.
Philip French, The Observer
Minnelli’s captivating musical still comes up fresh as paint with each successive viewing.
Tom Milne, Time Out
Vincente Minnelli
Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Astor, Leon Ames
USA
1944
English
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Credits
Screenwriter
Irving Brecher, Fred F. Finklehoffe
Cinematography
George Folsey
Editor
Albert Akst
Art Director
Lemuel Ayers, Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
