Will Groucho go the way of his namesake Karl into the dustbin of history? Not as long as there are New Year's Day hangovers and Marx Brothers Triple Features at the Brattle Theatre. Some quotes to savor are "You can't fool me! There ain't no sanity clause!" from A Night at the Opera (1935 | 1:30 + 7:30 pm) ; "If I hold you any closer, I'll be in back of you," from A Day at the Races (1937 | 3:30 + 9:30 pm); and "Don't worry - this isn't the first time I've been in a closet," from the rarely screened A Night in Casablanca (1946 | noon + 5:45 pm).

For more information or to view the full First Night schedule, click here or visit firstnight.org.

WFNX Presents: Rock & Roll Films | at the Stuart Street Playhouse, 200 Stuart St, Boston | "Back at You! . . . Punk Vids from the KINODV Archive" (classic punk and new wave footage) | 2 + 6:30 + 8:40 pm | Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam | 3:30 pm | Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields | 5 pm | Do It Again: One Man's Quest to Reunite the Kinks | 7:15 pm | Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everyone Talkin' About Him?) | 9:15 pm

I'm pleased to report that this has been a good year for roles for women, and the Academy will have its hands full trying to narrow the field down to only five nominees for Best Actress and Supporting Actress. That's progress: hurray for Hollywood!

On the other hand, it wasn't such a good year for animals. In fact, there were so few noteworthy roles for animals in this year's releases that in choosing the competition for the "Where's Whitey?" Award for Best Animal Performance I've had to resort to nominating performances in films I haven't seen, and even in one case a performance by an entrée.

As in previous years I've asked my Phoenix colleagues to contribute their Ten (or Five) Best and (optional) Five Not Best lists, along with comments if they are so inclined.

They have generously complied and I think you'll find their insights into the past year in film enlightening and sometimes provocative. Here is the first batch of lists

If he's not the best contemporary Chinese director, he's at least the most controversial. The Museum of Fine Arts' retrospective of the films of Lou Ye continues with Purple Butterfly (2003), which is set in Shanghai during World War II. A woman is dismayed when her Japanese lover joins the Imperial Army and her brother is murdered by Japanese fanatics, so she joins the resistance group of the title, only to have fate put her loyalties to the test.

Not that it should surprise anyone after Pia Zadora won their Best Actress Award in 1981 for her performance in “Butterfly” and Sharon Stone won in 1999 after buying everyone a gold watch, but this year’s Golden Globe nominations for the films "The Tourist" and “Burlesque,” derided by just about everyone including the star of the former, Angelina Jolie, might not have been exactly on the up and up

One of the biggest boons of the Dogme 97 movement, Danish actress Paprika Steen is as intense and piquant as her name would suggest. In Martin Zandvliet's Applause (2009), she plays Thea Barfoed, an actress just out of rehab. With her life in ruins, Thea tries to get it back together by playing Martha in a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - a role that proves an inspired, if unwise, choice.

Jonathan Kesselman's The Hebrew Hammer (2003) might be the cinematic equivalent of Adam Sandler's "The Chanukah Song." Adam Goldberg plays the super-agent of the title, a kind of circumcised Shaft who's hard pressed to take out Santa's evil son (played by Andy Dick) after the would-be Kringle knocks off his dad, takes his place at the sleigh, and vows to ruin the holidays for Jew and gentile alike.

If the holidays are getting you down, rest assured that life is treating you better than Michael Haneke treated his characters in Time of the Wolf (2003). Isabelle Huppert stars as a materfamilias who returns home from vacation and finds that the social order everywhere has broken down and people have resorted to barbarism.

Master of the screwball comedy Preston Sturges gets in the Yuletide spirit, sort of, with Christmas in July (1940), in which an office clerk thinks he's won $25,000 in a slogan-writing contest for Maxford Coffee. (His entry: "If you can't sleep, it isn't the coffee - it's the bunk.") Friends and neighbors rejoice, and he spends a fortune on gifts.

Slowly but surely, Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984) is becoming a holiday classic alongside It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, and Bad Santa. A dotty inventor goes Christmas shopping for his son and buys an adorable creature in Chinatown. But when the operating instructions are violated, what was once cute becomes very dicey indeed.

Jean-Luc Godard seemed to have buried himself in a Marxist ideological hole until he lit up the screen again with his weird, poignant, and lush Every Man for Himself/Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980). Ostensibly a film about sexual and economic relationships as well as every other aspect of human life, it contains perhaps the most hilarious and disturbing depiction of sex in the age of mechanical reproduction in cinema.

The Golden Globes, regarded as a bellwether of the Oscars (why? what is the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? Who are these people? No one ever answers), came up with their nominations today, and on the plus side five of the six Boston-accented performances I noted as potential Academy nominees got nods: Mark Wahlberg for Best Actor, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams for Best Supporting Actress and Christian Bale for Best Supporting Acto -- all from "The Fighter" (like its subject Micky Ward, a powerful late round contender, also getting in the Best Picture and Best Director races).

Özer Kızıltan's Takva (2006), an exquisite drama about how money corrupts the pious property manager of a Sufi temple in Istanbul, is one of the finest cinematic explorations of the uneasy truce between the secular and spiritual worlds. It screens as part of the Goethe-Institut's "Across Borders: The Atelier Ludwigsburg-Paris," and that's reason enough to check out this presentation and panel discussion on film education featuring local academics and representatives of that renowned European graduate film program.