It’s that time of the year: whether you’re celebrating, spending time with loved ones or avoiding festivities, the TV schedule is offering back-to-back specials, premiers and classic films. You’ve hopefully got some time off work, a chance to put your feet up, grab a blanket and cuppa, and unwind.

The Snowman (Channel 4, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) may be great, but it’s only 25 minutes long. You need new ideas to freshen up your screen time. Never fear: Red Pepper’s alternative winter watching guide is here!

The recent releases

Steve (2025)

Steve is a bleakly brilliant and surprisingly beautiful tale of well-meaning teachers’ love for ‘their’ kids and of troubled teenagers’ struggles, quietly revealing the lengths that teachers go to meet students where they are. Interwoven and mounting psychological challenges confront the two leads – Cillian Murphy’s eponymous Steve and Jay Lycurgo’s Shy, the original novella’s protagonist – building to a tearjerking yet heartwarming climax. 

The film is also a dose of blunt social realism, exposing the impact of ideologically-driven budget cuts on young people’s sanctuary spaces. The social analysis isn’t subtle at points – a teacher decries the ‘cuts, cuts, cuts’ – but its condemnations don’t need to be gentle. Steve also critiques the establishment British media, as a BBC-esque film crew invasively arrives to frame the reform school as either ‘radical social solution or waste of taxpayer money’. Later machinations implicate the media in supporting austerity-driven threats to shut the school down. 

The respect and admiration shown by Steve, father of two girls, to ‘his boys’ – complex, struggling teens – powerfully reminds us how great educators can (or should) see their work. But it shows, too, how much work is done beyond the remit of educating; how social work, counselling, support, life coaching and more is demanded of school teachers. Youth engagement – a word with different meaning in Steve’s 1990s setting – remains vital. Cameron Baillie

Directed by Tim Mielants. Watch on Netflix (no free trial, but you can cancel at any time)

Jay Lycurgo and Little Simz in Steve (2025)

CREDIT: ROBERT VIGLASKY/NETFLIX

December (2025)

Offering welcome to strangers is the key theme of the Nativity story. Today in Britain (and many places elsewhere) far-right agitators are demanding that Christian ‘tradition’ be at the forefront of the festive season. The painful ironic truth, of course, is that without an inn keeper finding space for a family in need when Bethlehem was ‘full’, Jesus would have been born into a deadly, freezing night.

As the festive season rolls into Poland and Belarus, this is the scene awaiting refugees moving through the border region’s snow-covered forests. Grzegorz Paprzycki’s chilling documentary charts their experiences through their own testimonies, contrasted at turns with shots of factories spitting out barbed wire, soldiers with weapons raised, local communities’ solidarity actions and Christmas celebrations in the warm. This important film is a difficult watch. While the ‘true’ meaning of Christmas remains a topic of dubiously-intended debate, human suffering continues unabated. Siobhán McGuirk

Directed by Grzegorz Paprzycki. Watch on Vimeo (rent for £2.27)

Kneecap (2024)

Belfast’s famous hip-hop trio shot fully into the public eye in 2025, following the May arrest of member Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh) under counter-terrorism measures and the BBC’s July decision not to live-stream the band’s Glastonbury set. Fewer column inches were devoted to the September ruling that the charge against Ó hAnnaidh was ‘unlawful’ and ‘null’. The avowedly pro-Palestine, anti-Imperial and fearlessly political band continue to riot within the mainstream entertainment industry – as their 2024 film (released by Sony Picture Classics, no less) attests.

If you missed the cinema release of this eponymous fictionalised-biopic-cum-comedy-drama – in which the singers ably play themselves – this is the perfect time to catch up. A propulsive, funny and even thrilling film, it asks serious questions about modern pathways into political education, struggles for language and civil rights and long legacies of colonialism and sectarianism. SM

Directed by Rich Peppiatt. Watch on BFI Player, Sky, Apple and more

Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí in Kneecap (2024)

Snowy scenes and family drama

The Eight Mountains (2022)

Most accounts of this film focus on the deep bond between the two male protagonists at the heart of the story, but it takes in so much more than friendship. Set high in the Italian Alps – revealed through sweeping cinematography and glimpses at the steady, but almost imperceptible, attrition of village life – the film mourns the loss of everyday connection with community and the land. That dynamic is attributed to the pull of the city with its associated opportunities and aspirations, which leads to a hollowing out of life’s richness as people become alienated wage slaves.

Deeply sad at points but ultimately profoundly uplifting, The Eight Mountains is a meditation on life and how time and connections can slip away. At a time of year prone to over-consumption and for spending time with family we might otherwise rarely see, the film’s examination of what really makes life good – as well as its snowy mountainous landscapes – make it a perfect alternative ‘seasonal’ film. The themes, cinematography and Daniel Norgren’s haunting soundtrack will linger in your consciousness long after its end. Darcy White

Directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. Italian with subtitles. Watch: MUBI (free trail available), BFI Player, Sky, Apple and more

Profoundly uplifting, The Eight Mountains is a meditation on life and how time and connections can slip away

Komi, a Journey Across the Arctic (2024)

The Indigenous Komi people live close to the Arctic Circle, herding reindeers through the harsh Siberian landscape. This largely observational documentary, with minimalist narration and interviews explaining key details, follows two families as they undertake their annual migration to escape the brutal winter and feed their 5,000 reindeer (which remain part-owned by the state). 

The filmmakers condense the group’s four-month journey across the Urals, from Europe into Asia, into a meditative, 50-minute film that offers stark reminders of human endurance and life in sync with nature alongside stunning visuals of a desolate tundra. With stirring music throughout, Komi will be unlike any reindeer films you’ve seen before. Andrew Brain

Directed by Andreas Voigt. Watch on YouTube via Slice Documentary (free ‘Premium’ trial available – or free with adverts)

Revisit a comedy classic

In The Loop (2009)

In dark times, with wars and militarism proliferating and threatened everywhere, satire can be fortifying. In the Loop’s fumbling, conniving war-instigators and media-spinsters feel both relevant and from a different time, as mid-2000s US legislators carve a warpath for invasion of an unnamed Middle Eastern country (the vagueness is highly intentional). 

As Whitehall aides and a hapless international development minister are tasked in to present a united, chauvinistic, transatlantic front, viewers are left with no doubts about power (im)balances in the ‘special relationship’. Political manoeuvres run through calculated press leakages and shrouded committee hearings. Knives plunge into backs from SW1 to Capitol Hill. It’s classic Iannucci, who wrote in 2020 that Donald Trump was beyond satire. Yet it’s important to remember that Starmer is not the first US President’s lap dog.

Following characters from Blair-era classic The Thick Of It, with all the ridiculous calamity and velocity of The Death of Stalin, In the Loop remains poignant throughout the furore. Capaldi’s sweary Malcom Tucker, based on Blairite spin-doctor-turned-podcast-padre Alistair Campbell, has the best lines, but don’t overlook the life-and-death story behind the braggadocio. Fickle, banal operatives wielding inexorable powers to determine the fates of millions – civilians, soldiers, entire nations – and shape history itself. CB

Directed by Armando Iannucci. Watch on BFI Player, MUBI, Apple and more