Five things to stream this New Year’s Eve weekend, from comforting rom-coms to slapstick Gremlins

It’s New Year’s weekend, and you are either at home looking for something comforting to watch in order to ring in 2023, or perhaps you’re half-awake, half-dressed, and half-aware of what exactly you did the night before, looking for a movie to cure your hangover. To mark the time-honoured year-end tradition of doing as little as possible, here are this weekend’s best streaming bets to fuel your general sense of malaise.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Crave)

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If Joe Dante’s original Gremlins is a perfectly surreal movie for Christmas Eve, then the director’s even stranger sequel was made for New Year’s Eve. The story shifts from small-town America to a Trump-y Manhattan skyscraper, where adorable mogwai Gizmo has been captured by some mad scientists. You know the drill: Gizmo eventually gets wet, his spawn are fed after midnight, chaos ensues. An absurdist romp that amps up the 1984 original’s slapstick, The New Batch is essentially a live-action Looney Tunes feature. It is raucous enough to make it feel like you’re hosting your very own NYE party, and silly enough that if you pass out and wake up 45 minutes later, you’ll still be able to figure out what’s going on.

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Aftersun (on-demand, including Apple TV)

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If you like ringing out or in the New Year by crying your eyes out – we can all use a little tenderness – then you need to queue up the new film Aftersun. The debut feature from Charlotte Wells is bookended by the thirtysomething Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) revisiting old camcorder footage of the summer vacation that she took with her father, Calum, in the late 1990s. The adult Sophie is searching for something – confirmation, denial, absolution? – about her father, though Wells keeps the truth vague. Mostly, this is a story of small moments, as we watch an 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) hang out with Calum (Paul Mescal), who is so young as to be mistaken for her brother rather than parent. Wells has made a film so devastating that you will thank her for breaking your heart in half.

You’ve Got Mail (Crave)

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To quote Seth Rogen, watching You’ve Got Mail is as calming an exercise as watching the waves of the ocean roll in. “You got Tom Hanks. You got Meg Ryan. You got a very likeable Greg Kinnear. You think you’re better than it … this movie is gonna suck … then you watch it and it becomes a part of you. It’s in you.” Truer words have never been uttered. Which means I guess that Rogen and his Longshot co-star Charlize Theron are destined to headline the inevitable remake?

Die Hard: With a Vengeance (Disney+)

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Part three in the John McClane saga is not the best Die Hard film (that would be No. 1), it’s not the silliest (No. 4) and it’s not the stupidest (No. 5). But Die Hard: With a Vengeance is the easiest to just let wash over you, a leisurely game of cat and mouse that makes excellent use of both its New York setting and Bruce Willis’s rough-and-tumble charm. I can think of no better way to spend a lazy New Year’s Day than watching Willis and Samuel L. Jackson bicker with each other as a wacko Jeremy Irons tears the Big Apple to pieces.

Step Brothers (Netflix)

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Cancel your subscription to Apple TV+ – presumably started only to watch Will Ferrell’s latest holiday romp, the highly uneven Spirited – and instead revel in the finest two hours of the actor’s career, as he helps create the most absurd piece of comedy of the 21st century. Endlessly quotable and expertly cast, Step Brothers is pure joy, and will kick off your New Year on the highest kind of low-comedy note.