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With the holidays approaching, my thoughts turn to parties, and the uptick in food and alcohol consumption that goes with the season. I’m girding myself for the onslaught. Drinking can be treacherous for many people, but I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy it over the years. Though technically a depressant, booze usually cheers me up and fortifies me, particularly when confronting a room full of relative strangers.

Eventually, there comes a point in the holiday festivities when the guys need to get away from the tinsel, lights, and pastries on doilies. Sometimes, they just need to crack open a beer and crowd around a high-testosterone movie. This list of manly titles cuts to the chase.

There’s a reason why great lines from movies become part of the culture: they express feelings with a concision and accuracy that rarely, if ever, happens in real life. And nowhere is such eloquence more valuable than in affairs of the heart. Movies say what we would like to say, and in romantic movies they say what we would most love to have said to us.

Small towns, kind strangers, generous impulses, lasting friendships, and oodles of pluck are just a few of the pleasures you’ll find in these blasts of (and to) the past.

We decided to look at a few of the past winners (and losers) to try to discern what might have contributed to some of the more head-scratching wins.

Whether or not you love to get behind the wheel yourself, the very act of looking at cars in movies is just plain fun. Of course, they always signal the era in which the movie was made (or set). But more than that, the car to modern film is what the horse is to the Western — the all-important means of shifting to a different sequence, and moving the action forward.

Revenge can be sweet, or it can be scary; it can be swift, or long awaited, but it is always gripping to witness. Here, then, is our roundup of some not-so-usual suspects delivering their own big doses of payback.

The camera loves Paris. Even a besieged Paris, or a gloomy Paris is still Paris, with all the history, beauty and artistic vibrancy that makes it among the world’s most cherished cities. So powerful is its identity, Paris is one of the few places that, like New York, is as much a state of mind as an actual place.

Top-ten lists of holiday films abound right about now, but what about picking the top three Christmas movies ever made? Certainly there's plenty to choose from. Christmas movies are almost a genre unto themselves: between live-action and animated features, there are literally hundreds of titles out there. Inevitably, some are pretty bad, others amusingly cheesy.