Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed horror blockbuster had people talking all year, proving industry naysayers wrong and breaking various records

It was the film that was supposed to destroy Hollywood: a vampire horror about life and times in the Jim Crow south peopled by a majority Black cast, and shot on Imax 70mm. Ryan Coogler, the acclaimed director who rose to prominence steering Marvel’s colossal Black Panther franchise, was thought to be out of his depth for trying to midwife a script he himself said he cobbled together in two months. Warner Bros, the studio fronting the film’s near $100m budget, was supposedly out of its mind for not only throwing that much money behind the project, but further agreeing to singularly favorable authorship deal terms that gave him control over the film’ final cut and full rights over the film after 25 years. Hollywood machers were convinced the film would never make money and that Warner Bros’ big gamble “could be the end of the studio system”. But Sinners never let that cynicism in.

Sinners landed in theaters on Easter weekend and delivered its own miracle resurrection, racing to a $368m gate on the way to becoming the highest grossing original film in the past 15 years, and the 10th-highest domestic-grossing R-rated film of all time. (That’s right: higher than Terminator 2 and the Hangovers.) At a time when Black heritage and culture are once again under intense political assault, Sinners provoked zeitgeist-y discourse around Black history, cultural erasure and entertainment industry politics. And the online memes poking fun at juke-joint scenes hit as hard as the thinkpieces unpacking the venue’s under-appreciated contributions to the American musical canon.

From a John Cusack 80s teen comedy to the other Frank Capra Christmas crowd-pleaser, here are some seasonal picks you might not have seen

Something that bugs me about a lot of contemporary Christmas movies is how insistently self-conscious they are about the whole production – the ostentatious decorations, checklist of soundtrack chestnuts, the dialogue about the true meaning of the holidays that sounds canned even when the movie is trying to acknowledge its various stressors. Maybe because the idea of a holiday movie hadn’t yet ossified into routine, I’ve found that the versions of these films that came out in the 1940s tend to approach Christmas from more inventive, less neurotically obsessive angles. One of my favorite discoveries in sifting through 1940s Christmas comedies is It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a 1947 semi-romantic farce with a great starting hook: a cheerful vagrant Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) winters in New York every year, because he knows a way into a particular Fifth Avenue mansion seasonally vacated by its enormously wealthy owner. One winter, Aloysius invites some new acquaintances to stay with him: veteran Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) and his military buddies, plus runaway Trudy O’Connor (Gale Storm) – who is secretly the daughter of the mansion’s owner. Eventually, the owner himself is forced to disguise himself as another vagrant and stay in the house, too, so Trudy can make sure Jim loves her on her own merits. This all takes place during the run-up to Christmas and into New Year’s, and director Roy Del Ruth gives the movie a found-family warmth that newer holiday movies have to labor two or three times as hard for, assembling a funny and lovable surrogate family in one of the city’s well-appointed empty spaces. Speaking of labor: It Happened on Fifth Avenue lands perfectly between class-conscious social picture about the importance of affordable housing and romantic urban fairytale. Jesse Hassenger

It Happened on Fifth Avenue is available on Plex and to rent digitally in the US, UK and Australia