Wishing for holiday films? Robert Downey Jr., George Clooney, and Penélope Cruz make the Yuletide look damn bright.

As movies fight for their share of the entertainment market, holidays take on more importance, as do ever more special effects and the usual big subjects and marquee names, showing up just in time to qualify for approving nods from Mr. Oscar.

These dates are firmer than usual, but some smaller items may shift slightly in the Christmas stocking. Mazel tov.

December 11
The Oscar race heats up this week with some of the biggest holiday releases. The prestige item here is Invictus, director Clint Eastwood’s tribute to Nelson Mandela, with Morgan Freeman as the iconic South African leader. Matt Damon is a rugby player whose fortunes are tied in with the anti-apartheid hero during the 1995 World Cup.

This is lighter than the struggle for freedom in segregated Africa, but another significant place and time is lovingly rendered in Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, which features a career-making performance by Christian McKay as the precocious Citizen Welles, circa 1937. Zac Efron, 17 again, is the high-school drama student who accidentally joins the upstart Mercury Theatre.

Don’t underestimate the charm of Up in the Air lead George Clooney as a mile-high-club veteran suddenly grounded with travelling companion Vera Farmiga, who is not enamoured of his corporate ways. It’s from Juno director Jason Reitman.

In The Princess and the Frog, Disney goes back to traditional animation but turns a familiar fairy tale on its ear by setting things in early twentieth-century New Orleans, thus putting the birth of jazz (í  la Randy Newman, natch) behind the tale of royal confusion.

No child changes species in The Horse Boy, which is a critically drubbed inspirational documentary about an autistic lad who finds his place among herdsmen on the Mongolian steppe.

Crude looks at what oil exploitation is doing to the global environment, and especially indigenous peoples, above and beyond climate-change issues.

December 18
Royalty gets real in The Young Victoria, with up-and-comer Emily Blunt as the new queen. Rather surprisingly, this oh-so-British period piece is from Canada’s Jean-Marc Vallée, director of C.R.A.Z.Y. He also managed to get Rupert Friend, as Prince Albert, in the can.

Penélope Cruz returns to her Spanish roots in Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, a super-stylish noir in which she plays an actor trying to get away from her suave sugar daddy.

The trailers make Did You Hear About the Morgans?—with a bickering couple forced to reconcile when they go into the witness-protection program—look like a gruelling sit. Still, the one-off pairing of Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker intrigues.

Remember James Cameron? The King of the World is back, hoisting his new Avatar, a 3-D IMAX adventure with Sigourney Weaver again tackling size-large aliens.

December 23
Aw, nuts: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the multiplex, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel sneaks up on you.

December 25
Okay, I totally buy a buffed Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes, especially in Guy Ritchie’s twisted vision. But Jude Law as the fumbling Dr. Watson? What next, Brad Pitt as Sancho Panza?

If the pairing of Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin as squabbling exes in It’s Complicated brings to mind Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson in Something’s Gotta Give, that could be because writer-director Nancy Meyers made both of ’em.

As everyone has heard, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was Heath Ledger’s last movie. But did you know it took Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law (again) to replace him in Terry Gilliam’s fevered vision?

In A Single Man, fashionable new director Tom Ford calls forth the Firth—Colin, that is—to play a gay professor mourning the loss of his long-time companion in 1960s Los Angeles. Julianne Moore is the fading beauty who wants to “save” him.

A sequel of sorts to Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, Nine is also Rob Marshall’s musical follow-up to his smash version of Chicago. Here, Daniel Day-Lewis is the troubled auteur, and Nicole Kidman and Penélope Cruz are among the women distracting him.