The best on Films TV over Christmas

Christmas Eve

The Towering Inferno

Although director John Guillermin piles on the star-power, it's the stunt work and the special effects which are the stars of this formulaic, though well above average, 1974 disaster movie in which stereotypes are placed in jeopardy, and not all survive. A characteristically ice-cool Steve McQueen plays the dedicated fire-fighter who comes to the rescue when a glass skyscraper burns, and he's joined by Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Robert Vaughn - and O.J. Simpson, who gets to rescue a cat.

RTE 1, 2 p.m.

Dumb And Dumber

Good taste, to paraphrase Mae West, has nothing to do with this outrageously crude and sometimes hilariously funny 1994 comedy featuring the elastic-faced Jim Carrey at his most eager to please. The slender and mostly irrelevant narrative involves Carrey, Jeff Daniels as his dim-witted, muchput-upon straight man, and a briefcase full of money. But the raison d'etre is to cram the yarn with relentless slapstick and bodily function jokes. RTE 1, 7.45 p.m.

The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult

Few movie cliches get away without being sent up in this agreeably silly and well-sustained 1994 skit, which reunites the regular cast led by deadpan Leslie Neilsen and Priscilla Presley. Prime targets are movie parodies, some inevitably a lot funnier than others, including The Crying Game (an elaborate take-off of that revelation), Thelma And Louise and The Untouchables, along with J. Edgar Hoover, Woody Allen, Rodney King and Richard Gere's 1993 Oscars speech. BBC 1, 9 p.m.

The Color Of Money

Paul Newman himself would hardly regard his performance here as the best of his enduring career, but it's the one which won him his Oscar, albeit a sentimental one in recognition of his life's work. That said, Newman sturdily reprises his Fast Eddie Felson character from The Hustler as he goes on the road setting up pool-hall scams with an arrogant young hotshot and his lover (well played by Tom Cruise and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) in this engrossing sequel directed by Martin Scorsese.

Network 2, 10.45 p.m.

Only You

Shot mostly on sumptuous Italian locations, this 1994 release is directed by Norman Jewison, but anyone hoping for a romantic comedy to match Jewison's endearing Moonstruck will be greatly disappointed by this routine yarn of a couple who are made for each other but take the whole movie to fall in love. A trite, wholly implausible screenplay defeats the best efforts of a good cast led by Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey jnr.

Channel 4, 11.25 p.m.

Christmas Day

Home Alone 2: Lost In New York

Director Chris Columbus played safe and lucratively replicated the proven formula of the original with this woefully protracted 1992 picture of the wily Kevin (the innocuous Macaulay Culkin) gleefully surviving again in a world of mostly incompetent adults. As the bumbling Chicago crooks he trounced first time round, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern are back to face an even more violent fate at his hands, and Brenda Fricker turns up as a lonely homeless woman he befriends. RTE 1, 3.40 p.m.; UTV, 7.30 p.m.

The Flintstones

Crucially, director Brian Levant gets the casting right in this 1994 live-action treatment of the old TV series, remoulding the key animated characters with lookalike actors - John Goodman all grinning and awkward as Fred Flintstone, Elizabeth Perkins as the coy and giggly Wilma, Rick Moranis as the naive Barney Rubble and Rosie O'Donnell as the ever-patient Betty. The visual humour scores over the feeble punning which peppers the screenplay, but there's by no means enough to stretch out a half-hour TV format to a full-length feature. BBC 1, 4.10 p.m.

Kind Hearts And Coronets

A darkly satirical comic gem from Ealing's heyday, Robert Hamer's 1949 picture deals with an impecunious Englishmen (Dennis Price) killing off the eight members of a family who stand between him and a dukedom. All eight characters are played with panache by Alec Guinness in a virtuoso acting showcase. With Valerie Hobson and Joan Greenwood. Channel 4, 5.30 p.m.

The Mask

Jim Carrey is perfectly cast in the modern-day Jekyll-and-Hyde central role of this flamboyant special-effects-driven 1994 comedy, a stylised comic-strip adaptation directed by Charles Russell. Carrey plays a human doormat who's too timid to stand up to a domineering boss, an aggressive landlady or nasty bouncers - until he finds an ancient mask and is transformed into a snappily dressed, green-headed, crime-fighting whirlwind. Cameron Diaz co-stars in her film debut. BBC 1, 6.50 p.m.

Speed

Even though it will lose some of its visual impact on the small screen, Jan de Bont's lean, consummately crafted 1994 action movie makes for exhilarating, breathlessly paced entertainment that switches into overdrive as soon as the opening credits are out of the way and powers along at a visceral rhythm for two adrenalin-pumping hours. A pumped-up Keanu Reeves plays the cool young LAPD officer in a battle of wits with a crazed, grudge-bearing explosives expert (Dennis Hopper), who has wired a bus with a bomb, with Sandra Bullock as the gutsy passenger who takes the wheel.

RTE 1, 9.35 p.m.

La Reine Margot

Patrice Chereau's epic Dumas adaptation, which won the best actress award for Virna Lisa at Cannes in 1994, is a plodding and ultimately tedious exercise set during the end of the Valois regime and the beginning of Bourbon rule. In its attempts to draw parallels with contemporary religious conflicts, it offers little more than blood and guts, and in attempting to simulate the available light of the period, looks merely muddy. The cast of thousands is led by a radiant Isabelle Adjani, a sunken-eyed Daniel Auteuil and a pastyfaced Jean-Hugues Anglade. BBC 2, 10.10 p.m.

Mortal Thoughts

Awkwardly structured in a series of extended flashbacks, Alan Rudolph's 1991 movie deals with two New Jersey hairdressers (Demi Moore and Glenne Headly), close friends who become suspects when the obnoxious, violent husband (Bruce Willis) of one of them is murdered. Harvey Keitel plays the investigating officer in this grim tale. UTV, 11.25 p.m.

Some Like It Hot

Billy Wilder's classic 1959 comedy is a wonderful entertainment which withstands repeated viewing like few movies. Seizing upon the wealth of material in the scintillating screenplay by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are a joy as the jazz musicians donning drag and joining an all-woman band to avoid pursuing mobsters, while Marilyn Monroe sparkles as one of the real girls in the band, and Joe E. Brown gets to deliver the movie's immortal closing line.

RTE 1, 12.25 a.m.

St Stephen's Day

Hook

A huge disappointment given all the talent involved, Steven Spielberg's lavish 1992 J.M. Barrie adaptation features a cringe-inducing Robin Williams as an overworked lawyer turned modern-day Peter Pan seeking out his children who've been kidnapped by Captain Hook (an amusingly hammy Dustin Hoffman) - and, groan, seeking his inner childhood self. In this cold, calculated and sprawling jumble bogged down by scale and effects, Julia Roberts (as Tinkerbell) seems totally bored by it all - an understandable attitude under the circumstances. BBC 1, 2.10 p.m.

Jurassic Park

Steven Spielberg yet again, this time with his hugely hyped, mega-budget 1993 adventure extravaganza populated by cardboard characters (played by Richard Attenborough, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill) and computer-generated creatures. This sanitised treatment of Michael Crichton's novel set in a Pacific island theme-park is simplistic and curiously hollow - and there's no convincing sense of the dinosaurs occupying the same space as the humans. RTE 1, 7 p.m.

Nell

The redoubtable Jodie Foster plays a young woman raised in a remote mountain cabin by her reclusive mother, a traumatised rape victim whose dislocated speech patterns provide her with the only language she knows. This 1994 movie is engrossing as it pulls the pieces of her life together, but director Michael Apted unwisely places an excessive emphasis on the burgeoning romance between the doctor and psychologist (Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson) on her case. Channel 4, 10 p.m.

Dances With Wolves

Kevin Costner's made his directing debut in 1990 with this thoughtful, sincere and leisurely paced western featuring himself as a suicidal cavalry officer during the American Civil War. Transferred to a frontier outpost, he gradually wins the respect of a Sioux tribe, and the love of a white women (Mary McDonnell) raised by them. The film won seven Oscars, including best picture and director, but most deservedly for John Barry's gorgeous, stirring score.

UTV, 10 p.m.

4 Weddings And A Funeral

Well worth savouring again, Mike Newell's witty, sophisticated and touching 1994 serious comedy features Hugh Grant in his breakthrough role as a reticent, self-deprecating English man terrified of making the commitment of marriage until he becomes infatuated with an American woman (Andie McDowell). This knowing and beguiling reflection on the nature of personal and sexual attraction is dexterously structured by writer Richard Curtis, although W.H. Auden provides the movie's best lines. A fine cast also includes John Hannah, Simon Callow and Kristin Scott Thomas. RTE 1, 10.05 p.m.

True Lies

A grand-scale, high-octane comedythriller that will be diminished on the small screen, James Cameron's slick and sleek 1994 entertainment, a remake of the French film La Totale!, out-Bonds 007 in its sharp humour and virtuoso set-pieces. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a multi-lingual international agent specialising in nuclear terrorism, with Jamie Lee Curtis as his wife who, after 15 years of marriage, still believes he works in computers. It builds to a spectacular finale.

BBC 1, 10.15 p.m.

The Browning Version

Mike Figgis's superfluous 1993 screen version of Terence Rattigan's play pales by comparison with the first. Albert Finney is, in every respect, the equal of Michael Redgrave, who starred in the 1951 version, as the cold academic facing up to the disappointments and frustrations of his life and career. But there is little else to commend this version which seems anachronistic updated to the present. With Greta Scacchi and Matthew Modine. BBC 2, 11.05 p.m.

The Confessional

This cool, contemplative and fascinating first feature from the Quebecois theatre director, Robert Lepage, cuts seamlessly between past and present, from 1952 as Alfred Hitchcock is shooting I Confess in Quebec City and 1989 when Lapage's narrator (Lothaire Bluteau) returns home to find his adopted brother (Patrick Goyette) working as a prostitute. What follows is artfully devised and executed, a quest for identity which plays like a detective story, complete with Hitchcockian red herrings. Channel 4, 12.05 a.m., followed by Hitchcock's I Confess at 2 a.m.

Trading Places

Perfect, light, late-night entertainment, John Landis's sparkling 1983 role-reversal comedy features Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche as mischievous millionaire brothers who frame their pompous nephew (Dan Aykroyd) for drug-pushing and install a street hustler (Eddie Murphy, never better) in his place. Jamie Lee Curtis and Denholm Elliott complete the strong central cast in this neatly scripted and very funny comedy.

RTE 1, 12.20 a.m.

Coma Michael Crichton's gripping and imaginative 1977 thriller is set in a Boston hospital where staff members are selling off the organs of freshly murdered patients. Genevieve Bujold is superb as the doctor who finds herself in peril when she discovers the plot. With Michael Douglas and Richard Widmark. RTE 1, 2.25 a.m.