Who can say what a world of Christmases will unfold this year? Sir Keir Starmer was knighted for services to the law long before he had to negotiate the horrors of Gaza and the Ukraine and the mystery of how to handle the British Labour party but who could have predicted that he would be caught up in the 6-7 enigma? Not only that but he knew the hand movements and demonstrated them to primary school kids who knew what to do without knowing the why and wherefore. A young friend speculated that it might be tied up with basketballers who were all, you know, six foot seven. But nobody knows. Does that seem like a paradigm of our times?

For some people the Christmas season is all about cricket. The young were registered at birth so they could, as members of the MCC, take their place at the Boxing Day Test, but there are different angles on this. Someone from a distinguished sporting family, famous as a poet and editor, said to a friend that he could think of nothing better than to follow each of the Ashes Tests round the country. His interlocutor, a glinting and ironic self-portraitist, replied, ‘I’d rather have an operation.’

In my long ago youth the latest Patrick White was a godsend at Christmas. Then there are the people who make their way through the great trashmeisters and read the collected Sherlock Holmes or Chesterton’s Father Brown or Dorothy L. Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey or Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlow sequence.

An Australian version of this would be to have a go at Arthur Upfield’s Boney books. The only trouble is that the indigenous super-sleuth Napoleon Bonaparte is deemed to be very much the wrong side of woke. He’s proudly billed as a ‘half-caste’, God help us.

Well, many years ago Boney was played on television by the distinguished New Zealand actor James Laurenson. One obvious alternative if you want a crime-fest is to watch the sequence of Mystery Road with Aaron Pedersen and then the prequel with Mark Coles Smith. It comes out of the cinematographic genius of Warwick Thornton and as both entertainment and drama it will hold its own with anything.

What a world we occupy at Christmas time as we cling to our favourite beach or hideaway.

This is a time of year when you can please yourself while paying fealty to the idea that nothing is as important as children and the homage to family, literal or chosen, who dominate our lives as we do our best to drink in the sun and read whatever books have fallen in our laps whether for professional reasons or because we want the low rent exhilarations of entertainment.

This festive time, full of the promise of sunshine and sea and light years away from dreaming of a white Christmas – unless we’ve hopped on a plane to the other side of the earth – allows for the full range of diversions.

It’s a Wonderful Life by Frank Capra with Jimmy Stewart is a Christmassy film but it will bear the scrutiny of any leisure time.

Ingmar Bergman once remarked that if life was going too fast for you go to the theatre, if it’s really going too fast for you go to church. It’s Winter Light, isn’t it, when the priest based on the great director’s father strides across the church to say, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth proclaim thy glory.’ He’s played by Gunnar Björnstrand, the Squire in The Seventh Seal to Max von Sydow’s Knight. Anyone who met Max von Sydow felt the power of a great introspective actor haunted by the footsteps in which he had trod.

But this is a time to catch up, to recapitulate, to take it easy.

Recently for us this took the form of having a look at Tarkovsky’s last film, made in Sweden, The Sacrifice, which was shot by Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s great cinematographer – who also shot the Paul Scofield/Peter Brook King Lear. It begins in the most distanced long shot. Erland Josephson (he was in Scenes from a Marriage) is accompanied by a little boy who has trouble speaking. There is a garrulous philosophy-obsessed friend on a bicycle, much talk of Nietzsche. The colour asserts itself, it warms, it gets closer, the man and the boy – he has a blood nose now – go back to the house. Susan Fleetwood (who was in the John Gielgud miniseries of Summer’s Lease and died shortly after) declares to her friends in the house that she liked being known as the wife of a great actor: the glories of his Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, the sublimity of his Prince Myshkin. We wonder about Josephson in the roles. Someone mentions an offer to perform in Australia. The Sacrifice is manifestly a masterpiece, as Tarkovsky’s films tend to be in their austere way, but this one is different and it’s compelling, and the way in which it captures the modulation of language is remarkable – when you want something that will make sense – deep sense – when you’re beyond idle entertainment.

If you want beguiling drama and you didn’t watch it when it was first on you might want to experience the ravishing Boy Swallows Universe. Who would have thought Queensland would look like a lost marvellous world?

If you were on the opposite side of the world you might want to have seen Matthew Rhys in Playing Burton in which the actor from The Beast in Me, late of Brothers and Sisters, plays the Welsh actor whose centenary is this year. In his memoirs Anthony Hopkins talks about the white-knuckled pain Burton put himself through in the attempt to give up the grog. Hopkins succeeded where the man who was twice married to Elizabeth Taylor, and who made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with her, failed. Matthew Rhys was superb as Dylan Thomas in The Edge of Love, a film admired by Bruce Beresford.

It would also be interesting if you were in spitting distance of the West End to see Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons directed by Ivo Van Hove, the man who has made his name as the director who does films as stage plays.