Essential Cinema!  Beginning Thursday (December 22) with Ingmar Bergman’s peerless Fanny and Alexander and running until December 30, the Essential Cinema! series brings four classics back to the Cinematheque’s big screen, where they belong. Other titles include Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. Visit thecinematheque.ca/ for dates and times.

Human  Gobsmacking aerial views of life on Earth mingle with unforgettable accounts of what it is to be human in Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s epic doc, praised by the Straight’s Craig Takeuchi as “indelible”, and starting at the Vancity Theatre on Thursday (December 22).

Rocky  The Rio Theatre celebrates Boxing Day (December 26, if you need the reminder) with a marathon screening of the first four Rocky movies (boxing, geddit?), starting with the 1976 chestnut that launched Sylvester Stallone into the stratosphere and ending with 1985’s much sillier Rocky IV.

One More Time With Feeling  Andrew Dominik’s acclaimed doc about the recording of the Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree album—made in the wake of the death of Nick Cave’s 15-year-old son, Arthur—gets a rare and precious encore screening at the Vancity Theatre next Thursday (December 29). 

McCabe & Mrs. Miller  Warren Beatty strolls into town (an exceedingly wintry North Vancouver, as it happens) looking to open a brothel, but he doesn’t reckon on Julie Christie’s hard-headed madam, Mrs. Miller, or a scene-stealing Hugh Millais as a killer hired by mining interests. The Vancity Theatre’s screening of this masterful “anti-western” from 1971 is in celebration of Leonard Cohen’s score, without which Robert Altman’s finest moment (no, really) wouldn’t be half the film it is. See it next Sunday (January 1) and Tuesday (January 3).