Your complete guide to Boxing Day movies 2025: The Housemaid, Rental Family, SpongeBob, Anaconda & more

Boxing Day is a beautiful day. By then, the work parties are done, errands run, family obligations largely over.

It’s a day for you.

Some people insist on watching the cricket, others want to go bargain hunting at the sales (you do you), but what you really want to do is escape into the air-conditioning of a cinema, shut out the world and be immersed in a storytelling experience.

There are seven new releases this Boxing Day to transport you to another world.

ANACONDA

OK, so this isn’t a remake, reboot or sequel of the 1997 JLo and Ice Cube snake movie, which has become something of a beloved trash classic, but it is directly engaged with it.

This is directed and co-written by Tom Gormican, who did that brilliant comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Nicolas Cage plays a meta-version of himself, and that’s the spirit of this Anaconda.

Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Thandiwe Newton and Steve Zahn play friends who used to make movies when they were kids. Feeling the burn-out and disappointment of middle-age, they decide to take off to the jungle and remake Anaconda.

As one character says at one point, “We came here to make Anaconda and now we are in it”, as they’re hunted by a bloody big snake. Like, an enormous, slithery, quick-as-a-whip, deadly snake.

Filmed in Queensland (standing in for the Amazon), Anaconda is goofy and ridiculous, and it’s exactly the movie you want for a good time, a lot of laughs and minimal thinking.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE

A top three film of the year, this wonderful Norwegian film reunites director Joachim Trier and star Renate Reinsve, the team behind The Worst Person in the World. Here, they’re joined by Stellan Skarsgard, Elle Fanning and a scene-stealing Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas.

A family drama that spans generations and they traumas they’ve refused to confront, Sentimental Value is a rare film that leads you, not push you. It’s never heavy-handed and the emotional climax creeps up on you.

Skarsgard plays an esteemed filmmaker who returns to Oslo to make his first movie in a decade, a personal project inspired in part by his own mother’s death when he was a child. He wants daughter Nora, a theatre actor, to be in it.

But decades of semi-estrangement has led to a lot of unresolved resentments, and Nora refuses.

A truly stunning piece of cinema.

THE HOUSEMAID

Based on a best-selling novel by Frieda McFadden, this pulpy thriller is directed by Paul Feig and features a trio of in-demand stars – Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar.

But it’s Elizabeth Perkins as an icy mother-in-law who probably gets the best withering looks.

The story is centred on Millie, a street smart young woman who’s living out of her car when she hustles her way into a job as a live-in maid for a wealthy family. The home is lush and Millie gets her own attic bedroom.

Her new boss, Nina, seemed totally normal at the interview but after Millie starts, Nina turns Jekyll and Hyde with her erratic and unhinged behaviour. Millie can’t just leave, she has nowhere to go, but can’t understand what’s really going on inside this house.

There are, of course, secrets lurking, and no one is what they seem.

The movie’s twists and turns are largely predictable, but The Housemaid has a certain over-the-top vibe that is, if nothing else, entertaining. If you liked Feig’s A Simple Favour movies, this has a similar tone.

RENTAL FAMILY

Brendan Fraser’s comeback story has been framed as a Cinderella tale. He seems genuinely happy to be working in higher profile projects again, and in all his interviews, he revealed himself to be someone who was openly vulnerable and kept his emotions near the surface.

That’s what Fraser is bringing to Rental Family, a tender drama about an American man liking in Tokyo. His character, Phillip, is an actor and only books background roles or advertising mascot gigs.

Then he’s hired by an agency to play a mourner at a fake funeral, and discovers a world where client rent “family” members to fulfil a need.

Through two clients who doesn’t know he’s an actor – one a young girl whose mother hires Phillip to pretend to be her estranged father, another a retired actor whose daughter brings on Phillip to be a journalist writing a profile – he forms real connections from fake relationships.

Rental Family is a little schmaltzy but it is sweet, and relatable to anyone who’s ever had a lonely moment.

MY BROTHER’S BAND

This French film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival where members of a real-life community brass band from the working class town some of the production was filmed in, walked the red carpet and then broke out their instruments at the end of the screening.

It was a feel-good moment for a feel-good film, in which life imitated art imitated life.

The story of My Brother’s Band (also known as The Marching Band and by its French name, En Fanfare) is a crowd-pleaser, reinforcing the ideal that difference cannot divide us.

It tells the tale of two biological brothers, Thibault (Benjamin Lavernhe) and Jimmy (Pierre Lottin), who weren’t aware of each other’s existence until Thibault is diagnosed with leukaemia and needs a bone marrow transplant.

Thibault was adopted by a Parisian family and comes from a world of privilege as an acclaimed conductor who’s in demand internationally. Jimmy was taken on by a working-class single mum and went to live in a regional town whose main employer has shut down.

But what brings them together is a love of music, and the redemptive, collectivist powers of a community.

URCHIN

You have to be impressed with young British actor Harris Dickinson. Even as a thespian, he is still relatively fresh on the scene with his breakthrough role in the Maleficent sequel dating back to only 2019.

From there, it’s been a spectacular rise with the likes of Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl, The King’s Man and The Iron Claw on his credits list. Many of his contemporaries would be satisfied with that.

Dickinson wanted to do more with his creative juices. Urchin is his feature directorial debut, which was selected to premiere at Cannes earlier this year, competing in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section.

He’s in his own film but not as the main character, Mike, which is played by Frank Dillane. A compassionate and confidently directed film about an unhoused young man in London battling poverty and addiction, it’s a humanist approach that doesn’t judge its protagonist.

SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SEARCH FOR SQUAREPANTS

SpongeBob is an empire onto itself. Who would’ve thought a trouser-wearing yellow sponge would go on to be such a big deal.

How big a deal? In addition to the regular TV series that has been running for more than a quarter of a century, this film, Search for Squarepants, is the fourth theatrical movie in the franchise.

Originally slated to go direct to streaming, the powers-that-be realised that it was worth throwing it into cinemas when kids’ flicks have been doing so well, especially in a calendar that has a dearth of release these past few months.

The story follows SpongeBob’s quest when a ghost pirate, The Flying Dutchman (voice of Mark Hamill), who has been cursed to roam the underworld, tricks him into a series of challengers so he can become a verified swashbuckler.

One for the kids, but maybe secretly also for the parents?

Still playing: Zootopia 2, Nuremberg, The Golden Spurtle, Wake Up Dead Man, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Eternity, The History of Sound, Wicked: For Good, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, A Paw Patrol Christmas, Dead of Winter, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba Infinity Castle, Kukoho, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, After the Hunt, Die My Love, Frankenstein, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, The Mastermind, Train Dreams and Bad Shabbos