Christmas movies are a dime a dozen (Hanukkah movies, on the other hand, are almost as rare as diamonds). Hallmark and Lifetime premiere new holiday movies every week during November and December. Theaters have multiple movies about Christmas premiere annually during the holiday season. Hell, Christmas movies have premiered in the summer; Die Hard, that Christmas action movie, was released in July. There are enough Christmas movies to die in.

On the other hand, New Years movies are harder to find. Though they only happen a week after Christmas, New Years is regularly omitted. That’s because New Years has a very different meaning to the holiday than Christmas. Where we regularly associate Christmas (and Thanksgiving) with tradition and looking back towards the past, New Years is more about change, coming to terms, and looking forward into the next year. Christmas celebrates and shares our success with loved ones; New Years takes stock of our progress and sets our personal resolutions to learn from our past mistakes.

An old friend told me that her favorite New Years narrative was The Tempest, Shakespeare’s play where a group of characters crash on an island where they’re forced to confront the emotional wreckage from their various mistakes. She said that the uncomfortable differences – between magic and realism, comic and tragic, chaste and sexual, past and future,  – highlighted how much change and progress happens, even as it sets itself up for an uncertain future. Her favorite versions varied, but she always swore by 1956’s Forbidden Planet.

In these ways, New Years movies tend to focus less on the family side of life and more on beginning and endings of something. People discover a new love, find a new meaning, realize something was wrong, or try to make something right. Strange Days, made about the dawn of the new millennium, is a perennial new years movie for me. It takes stock of current power structures, how those structures reinforce themselves, and how humans try to make things right (and what happens after the movie).

From When Harry Met Sally… to 200 Cigarettes, you probably have no shortage of movies to celebrate the holiday. What does New Years mean to you? What movies do you associate with the holiday? Why do you celebrate the way you do?