Top Five Movies Set in Winter - Picked by Christina Rees, Curator of Fort Worth Contemporary Arts

Fargo and Nanook of the North

I suppose everyone expects Fargo, right? And they should. And Nanook of the North, a documentary every first-year film school student is forced to watch for a good reason (ethics, right?), is a great way to be thankful we don’t live too far north.
So getting those two out of the way as a given, I’ll go on with my little list that reflects narratives set in gray, cold climates that remind me I hate the cold—while I sit bundled up in my house on a third iced-in day in North Texas–and I love the combo of snow days and DVDs.
American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)

This horror-comedy holds up well. Jack and David shiver earnestly toward the beginning of the movie (because they are–no need to fake the icy breath a la David Fincher in the Social Network), setting out across the moors of Northern England, after receiving an equally chilly reception from the locals at a pub. And David looks genuinely cold after waking up naked in the London Zoo. Plus, the soundtrack is great. I never hear Van Morrison’s “Moondance” without thinking of poor David’s excruciating, bone-cracking transformation to werewolf.
Valhalla Rising (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2009)

I irrationally love this strange, quiet, violent Scandinavian movie, starring Mads Mikkelson as the one-eyed mute warrior in some quasi-Viking hell. Awash in murky symbolism, the whole film feels cold, but the first third set in the desolate, windswept landscape, where a half-naked One Eye is forced to fight others in the freezing mud, is fun and queasy and spectacularly frigid.
Backbeat (Iain Softly, 1994)

The biopic of the earliest Beatles, set mostly in chilly, overcast Hamburg, focuses on Stu Sutcliff’s (Stephen Dorff) ill-fated place in the band. I like Ian Hart’s razor-sharp portrayal of John Lennon (a reprisal of his take in Softly’s earlier short, The Hours and Times), and though this movie is far from perfect, it’s a dignified and entertaining angle on the rough lead up to stardom. These boys worked hard and played hard, and suffering through Hamburg’s weather was the least of it. The all-star band that put together the film’s soundtrack featured Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth among other notables, and their furiously explosive take on the song “Rock and Roll Music” is excellent on its own. I do think the Beatles must have sounded like this in 1961, hopped up on amphetamines and playing their third set of the night in some dank, crappy bar.