Sunday, December 24 | 12:30 pm
There are Christmas movies and then there are Christmas movies… and then there is Die Hard. In a category all its own, Twentieth Century Fox’s iconic Bruce Willis action blockbuster opens on Christmas Eve, with Willis’s NYPD cop John McClane traveling to Los Angeles to reconcile with his estranged wife, Holly. However, a group of East German terrorists, led by the magnificently named Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), have taken Holly’s entire office hostage during their annual Christmas party. Comprised of numerous visual and thematic allusions to the Christmas story, not mentioned a narrative that has been described as “one of the most carefully sculpted Christmas allegories in history,” Die Hard might not yet evoke the holidays in the same way as mistletoe and eggnog for everyone–but the film’s sizeable and very vocal “Die Hard is a Christmas movie is a cult” is changing that quickly.
Director John McTiernan | 1988 | In English (with German and Italian) | 131 minutes | R | DCP