What the making of a broken person looks like across sixty years of cinema.

01

Scrooge1951

Alastair Sim's 1951 adaptation remains the standard against which all others are measured. The film earns its transformation by taking seriously what made Scrooge that way, giving each ghost's visit the weight of evidence.

02

Battle Royale2000

Kinji Fukasaku's film drops a class of junior high students onto an island with one rule: one must survive. The violence is not what lingers. The faces of the kids who made it out are.

03

Pearl2022

Ti West's prequel to X follows a young woman in 1918 Texas whose ambitions and isolation press against each other until something breaks. Mia Goth's performance is a self-portrait of a specific kind of desperation.

04

Ebenezer2026

Ti West brings horror discipline to the Dickens text. Johnny Depp plays Scrooge as a man who built so many walls he forgot what was inside them, and the ghosts are here to remind him.

05

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping2026

The 50th Hunger Games, and young Haymitch Abernathy's first. Francis Lawrence directs from Suzanne Collins' prequel novel, and the dramatic irony is built in: we already know who this boy becomes.