We’re still being walloped by one of the biggest snowstorms Boston has seen in years — a blizzard already drawing inevitable comparisons to the legendary winter of ’78, even if the final totals will fall short of that benchmark. With roughly a foot-and-a-half of snow dumped across much of the area, sidewalks have become trenches, streets narrowed to icy corridors, and daily routines reduced to shoveling and navigating drifts then retreating indoors for nourishment, Advil and a restorative glass of wine.
To provide cinematic relief from cabin fever, we bring you viewing recommendations fall into two weather-related categories: surviving the snow, and escaping it for someplace warmer. Below are two lists devoted to both impulses — because whether characters are battling a bombogenesis or fleeing toward tropical paradise, some of how it works out in these movies makes being here look not so bad.
Snowfall Simpatico
Sometimes misery loves company. Why not ride out the blizzard with some characters even more stressed than you? The high-water mark for wintertime paranoia is John Carpenter’s remake of “The Thing” (1982), in which Kurt Russell and his fellow Antarctic researchers try to determine who among them remains human and who has been infected by a shapeshifting, man-eating space alien.
Quentin Tarantino has cited “The Thing” as an unlikely influence on his snowbound western “The Hateful Eight” (2015), which would complement it nicely in a nerve-shredding double feature. While there is no supernatural menace in Tarantino’s film — only the all-too-familiar evil of postbellum racism — his characters share a similar sense of closed-quarters animosity. Plus, both films feature killer scores by the great Ennio Morricone.
If you dig the western vibes of “The Hateful Eight” but would prefer the tension dialed down a notch (or ten), check out Robert Altman’s freewheeling “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1972). A small-time outlaw (Warren Miller) joins forces with an English madam (Julie Christie) to found a brothel on the snowy American frontier, which in turn becomes the hub of an expanding village. Warren Beatty’s bowler hat and enormous bearskin coat form one of cinema’s most iconic winter looks, at once comical and effortlessly cool.
Further off the beaten path is “The White Reindeer” (1952), Erik Blomberg’s dreamy Finnish folktale of witchcraft and revenge. In a remote village, a young woman’s love spell goes awry, granting her irresistible charm but transforming her into a murderous reindeer spirit upon each full moon. While the plot follows the standard folk horror beats, the photography is nothing short of stunning, from the blinding snowy vistas to the eerie reindeer burial ground with hundreds of antlers jutting out of the ground like tombstones.
Of course, maybe you’d prefer something a little more lighthearted. In that case, might I suggest “Ski Party” (1965), in which Frankie Avalon leaves the beach (and Annette, who appears only in cameo) for a cozy ski lodge in the hills of Idaho. It’s as much dopey fun as any of Frankie’s beach pictures, with some killer musical performances by James Brown and Lesley Gore. Is it fine cinema? Perhaps not, but it’s as irresistible as a mug of cocoa.
Paradise Found or Lost
Warm-weather escape has long served as cinema’s antidote to emotional and environmental chill, and the films gathered here explore that impulse from angles both comforting and unsettling.
In “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (2008), Nicholas Stoller’s sharp, self-aware comedy sends a recently dumped musician from gray Los Angeles malaise to a Hawaiian resort, where sunshine becomes equal parts therapy and humiliation. The film understands that escape rarely happens instantly; heartbreak follows Jason Segel’s hapless protagonist across the Pacific, only gradually dissolving amid surf lessons, awkward encounters and unexpected connection.
Hawaii also serves as the backdrop for Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” (2011), though here, paradise is stripped of its normal gloss as George Clooney’s conflicted father navigates family crisis and ancestral responsibility against landscapes that feel lived-in rather than idyllic. Like he does with many of his films (“Sideways,” “Holdovers”), Payne grounds the tragi-comedy in grief, obligation and complicated belonging.
Brandon Cronenberg’s “Infinity Pool” (2023) twists the vacation premise into something far darker. Imagine an exclusive resort where wealth allows visitors to evade consequences through grotesque technological loopholes. Sunlit beaches and luxury spreads become morally corrosive chalices. Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth are perfect as cuck and gore obsessed dom.
Albert Serra’s hypnotic “Pacifiction” (2022) drifts even further from conventional narrative, portraying Tahiti as a languorous geopolitical fever dream in which a French official wanders through nightclubs, diplomatic whispers and ocean horizons charged with unseen nuclear anxiety. Serra —who also scored with last year’s documentary contemplation on bull fighting, “Afternoon of Solace” — transforms “White Lotus”-esque typical beauty into a place suspended between colonial residue and looming threat, where heat slows time and certainty dissolves.
Closing out our list is a complete reframe of the vacation movie, “Aftersun” (2022). Charlotte Wells presents a Turkish resort through fragments of memory recalled years later by a daughter (Celia Rowlson-Hall and Frankie Corio when younger) trying to understand her father (Paul Mescal). Swimming pools glow with nostalgic warmth as the film reveals how holidays often preserve moments we fail to recognize as fragile while they are happening. Wells’ nonlinear narrative and aloof lens heighten the emotional journey in subtle and affecting ways.
Taken together, these films suggest that escape is never purely geographical: the tropics may promise reinvention, relief or oblivion (“The Beach”), but what travelers often discover instead is reflection. Whether comic, tragic or dreamlike, each story uses warmth and distance to illuminate emotional truths that colder settings — arguably — keep hidden. For viewers watching the snow pile against windows and streets disappear beneath bomb cyclone’s weight, these cinematic journeys offer temporary passage elsewhere — reminders that sometimes the fantasy of leaving is as restorative as arrival itself.
A stronger
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