The Best Christmas Movies That Are Also Just Great Movies
CultureWe're assuming you don't need us to tell you about Elf, It's a Wonderful Life or Die Hard. Here's a list of 16 less-obvious film picks that still fit the season like a sequined reindeer sweater.By Jesse HassengerDecember 24, 2024Everett CollectionSave this storySaveSave this storySaveUnlike other holidays, there’s no urgent shortage of Christmas movies, even good ones. But the best Christmas movies—the ones with a little more sophistication and a little less fantasy—don’t always get the same promotion from the streaming-list-industrial complex. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with family-friendly classics like Miracle on 34th Street, Elf, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, The Muppet Christmas Carol, or The Nightmare Before Christmas – or, for that matter, with familiar adult-skewing titles like Bad Santa. But don’t grown-ups deserve a little more variety than family movies chased with the stale novelty of claiming Die Hard as a holiday classic after the kids are in bed? In honor of the many and varied moods that come with more grown-up Christmas celebrations, rather than just relentless good cheer or subversion of same, here are 16 of the best Christmas movies that aren’t all the same old cable faves that play on a loop annually. To keep it truly original, let’s impose further limits: nothing with Santa, elves, Scrooges, or living snowmen. (Sorry, Jack Frost.) This list aims to cover a range of American cinema from the 1940s onward—with a heavy concentration in that decade, which was something of a golden age for human-scale Christmas entertainment. Even the light romances about rediscovering small-town charm are less chintzy!The Shop Around the Corner (1940)Everett CollectionThe basic mechanics of The Shop Around the Corner may be familiar to anyone who has enjoyed the Peak Nora Ephron rom-com You’ve Got Mail, around the holidays or otherwise; Ephron was remaking this Ernst Lubitsch classic about co-workers (James Stewart and Margaret Sullvan) who annoy each other IRL but fall in love via anonymous correspondence. Here they’re pen pals, of course, not AOL buddies, and they work at the same leather-goods store; the competing bookstores were a clever invention of Ephron’s. As good as the newer version is, there’s something timelessly charming and effortlessly sweet about the original—on top of which, a surprising amount of the movie digs into the details of working retail during the holiday season.Remember the Night (1940)Everett CollectionJust before screenwriter Preston Sturges embarked on his own directing career, Mitchell Leisen directed his Christmas-themed script Remember the Night (not to be confused with Christmas in July, a not-particularly-Christmassy movie Sturges directed himself, which came out later in 1940; for that matter, Remember the Night, like Shop Around the Corner just a few weeks earlier, was a January release for some reason). Barbara Stanwyck plays an arrested shoplifter awaiting trial, whose prosecutor (Fred MacMurray) winds up bailing her out and bringing her to his hometown for Christmas break—which is to say, this is a classic Sturges mixture of comedy, romance, and crime. It’s also a bit more sentimental and less tartly hilarious than the cocktails Sturges mixed on his own, but MacMurray and especially Stanwyck are in terrific form. They’re so winning that their love story becomes genuinely heartwarming, rather than farcical in its unlikeliness.Christmas Holiday (1944)Everett CollectionMost PopularGQ RecommendsGap Is Back, and It's Playing the Hits Better Than EverBy Reed NelsonSales (Style)15 Last-Chance Watch Deals Resolutely Ticking OnBy Avidan GrossmanGQ RecommendsThis Aesop Sale Smells Too Good To Be True (But It Is)By Danielle DiMeglioDirector Robert Siodmak has a noirish thriller for every taste: Traditionally hard-boiled, horror-adjacent, proto-feminist, gothic melodrama, and, yes, holiday melancholy. Christmas Holiday is not one of his best-regarded movies; a lot of the crime stuff is off screen, leaving room for more domestic material between a troubled woman (singer Deanna Durbin) and her unstable, violent husband (Gene Kelly!). Yet Siodmak, a master of mood and tone, really captures something here. The Christmas Eve framing device gives the sad story a sense of regret and reflection that makes it one of the few movies to evoke the half-wistful, half-depressing feeling of hanging out in a bar on Christmas Eve.Christmas in Connecticut (1945)Everett CollectionApparent Christmas Queen Barbara Stanwyck completes her holiday trilogy (Meet John Doe has Christmas elements, though not as foregrounded) with this comedy of deception, in which she's a cheerfully single New York writer whose magazine columns paint a phony picture of domestic life on a Connecticut farm—which she must then fake for her publisher when he arranges for a war hero (Dennis Morgan) who loves her recipes to visit the (nonexistent) family farm. No prizes for guessing if they f
Unlike other holidays, there’s no urgent shortage of Christmas movies, even good ones. But the best Christmas movies—the ones with a little more sophistication and a little less fantasy—don’t always get the same promotion from the streaming-list-industrial complex. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with family-friendly classics like Miracle on 34th Street, Elf, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, The Muppet Christmas Carol, or The Nightmare Before Christmas – or, for that matter, with familiar adult-skewing titles like Bad Santa. But don’t grown-ups deserve a little more variety than family movies chased with the stale novelty of claiming Die Hard as a holiday classic after the kids are in bed? In honor of the many and varied moods that come with more grown-up Christmas celebrations, rather than just relentless good cheer or subversion of same, here are 16 of the best Christmas movies that aren’t all the same old cable faves that play on a loop annually. To keep it truly original, let’s impose further limits: nothing with Santa, elves, Scrooges, or living snowmen. (Sorry, Jack Frost.) This list aims to cover a range of American cinema from the 1940s onward—with a heavy concentration in that decade, which was something of a golden age for human-scale Christmas entertainment. Even the light romances about rediscovering small-town charm are less chintzy!
The basic mechanics of The Shop Around the Corner may be familiar to anyone who has enjoyed the Peak Nora Ephron rom-com You’ve Got Mail, around the holidays or otherwise; Ephron was remaking this Ernst Lubitsch classic about co-workers (James Stewart and Margaret Sullvan) who annoy each other IRL but fall in love via anonymous correspondence. Here they’re pen pals, of course, not AOL buddies, and they work at the same leather-goods store; the competing bookstores were a clever invention of Ephron’s. As good as the newer version is, there’s something timelessly charming and effortlessly sweet about the original—on top of which, a surprising amount of the movie digs into the details of working retail during the holiday season.
Just before screenwriter Preston Sturges embarked on his own directing career, Mitchell Leisen directed his Christmas-themed script Remember the Night (not to be confused with Christmas in July, a not-particularly-Christmassy movie Sturges directed himself, which came out later in 1940; for that matter, Remember the Night, like Shop Around the Corner just a few weeks earlier, was a January release for some reason). Barbara Stanwyck plays an arrested shoplifter awaiting trial, whose prosecutor (Fred MacMurray) winds up bailing her out and bringing her to his hometown for Christmas break—which is to say, this is a classic Sturges mixture of comedy, romance, and crime. It’s also a bit more sentimental and less tartly hilarious than the cocktails Sturges mixed on his own, but MacMurray and especially Stanwyck are in terrific form. They’re so winning that their love story becomes genuinely heartwarming, rather than farcical in its unlikeliness.
- Sales (Style)15 Last-Chance Watch Deals Resolutely Ticking On
Director Robert Siodmak has a noirish thriller for every taste: Traditionally hard-boiled, horror-adjacent, proto-feminist, gothic melodrama, and, yes, holiday melancholy. Christmas Holiday is not one of his best-regarded movies; a lot of the crime stuff is off screen, leaving room for more domestic material between a troubled woman (singer Deanna Durbin) and her unstable, violent husband (Gene Kelly!). Yet Siodmak, a master of mood and tone, really captures something here. The Christmas Eve framing device gives the sad story a sense of regret and reflection that makes it one of the few movies to evoke the half-wistful, half-depressing feeling of hanging out in a bar on Christmas Eve.
Apparent Christmas Queen Barbara Stanwyck completes her holiday trilogy (Meet John Doe has Christmas elements, though not as foregrounded) with this comedy of deception, in which she's a cheerfully single New York writer whose magazine columns paint a phony picture of domestic life on a Connecticut farm—which she must then fake for her publisher when he arranges for a war hero (Dennis Morgan) who loves her recipes to visit the (nonexistent) family farm. No prizes for guessing if they fall in love in the midst of her ruse. You may, in fact, be asking yourself: Do I really need to see two different movies where city slicker Barbara Stanwyck is charmed by attending a small-town dance at a barn? The answer is, no, of course not; you get to see two different movies where Barbara Stanwyck attends a small-town dance at a barn. Bizarre trivia: the made-for-TV remake from 1992 is also the only feature directorial effort to date from one Arnold Schwarzenegger.
- Sales (Style)15 Last-Chance Watch Deals Resolutely Ticking On
Every winter, the ultra-rich owner of a mansion on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue boards his place up for the season and decamps for a warmer climate, which creates an annual holiday tradition for a traveling hobo (Victor Moore): break in, make himself at home, and spend the winter months in luxury. This time, though, he brings along a down-on-his luck veteran (Don DeFore) and they meet the owner’s runaway daughter (Gale Storm), who conceals her true identity as she falls for the vet. Those are the first few of many complications and deceptions running through this charming farce, which celebrated a Found Family type of Christmas well before that phrase became a buzzword, and without sacrificing its high-low screwball bona fides.
It takes some gumption to make a Christmas movie almost completely devoid of seasonal imagery: no colored lights (this is a western, set sometime in the 19th century), no snow (it was shot in Death Valley), and no family gatherings—at least not traditionally, because the godfathers of the title are a trio of unrelated outlaws. Instead, the fifth of the 14 collaborations between star John Wayne and director John Ford is a loose retelling of the Three Wise Men story, only here the men wind up accidentally protecting, rather than intentionally visiting, a newborn baby during the Christmas season—as they’re pursued by the law following a bank robbery. Some of that material is a little boilerplate, but once they take charge of the baby, the movie mixes light comedy with a touching depiction of male responsibility and holiday-season selflessness.
- Sales (Style)15 Last-Chance Watch Deals Resolutely Ticking On
The Criterion Channel did a series on holiday noir in 2023, and many of them were worth watching—but several were either only noir-adjacent, or holiday-adjacent. Cover-Up is notable for well and truly integrating a noirish plot about an insurance investigator coming to town to figure out whether a suspicious death ruled a suicide may actually have been a murder, and a tinsel-strewn romance plot about that same insurance investigator falling in love with a local girl who’s come home for the holidays. What the hell kind of a company sends an investigator out on a business trip around Christmas Eve remains uncommented upon; at first, the supposed“resistance” he encounters to his fact-finding seems more like, you know, the holidays, rather than cause for suspicion. But even the slightly wan solution to this compact 80-minute mystery stays pretty thematically on-point related to the reason for the season, and there’s holiday trimmings – piles of presents, tinsel-decked trees, a public tree-lighting ceremony – to dress up both the romance and the shadowy intrigue. All in all, more hometown-girl-falls-in-love Christmas movies should involve demands for the exhumation of a corpse.
- Sales (Style)15 Last-Chance Watch Deals Resolutely Ticking On
Speaking of holiday noir: If you hold any ambivalence or loneliness in your heart regarding Christmas, Blast of Silence really feels like the season, because this movie is cold as hell. Frank Bono (Allen Baron, who also directed and co-wrote) returns to his hometown for the holidays— only he’s in New York City to carry out a murder for hire. Mostly, he skulks around the city, stalks his prey, and makes an emotionally gutting detour when he bumps into some childhood friends. Shot in stark, striking black-and-white featuring real NYC locations (a relative rarity at the time), the movie’s documentary factor has only increased over the years, as it offers glimpses of classic New York holiday scenery from over half a century ago, which form a sharp contrast with its hardboiled narration and desolate, desperate atmosphere. If you wish David Fincher’s The Killer had been a Christmas movie, this is the picture for you.
This slasher pioneer belongs at the top of any holiday horror list, but it’s so good that it also deserves the token horror spot on any grown-up Christmas list. Less famous than fellow holiday-themed slasher Halloween (which it preceded by four years) or its fellow 1974 slasher The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Bob Clark’s movie about a sorority menaced by an anonymous killer is one of the most purely aesthetically pleasing horror movies and Christmas movies ever made, all saturated lighting and beautiful grain.
- Sales (Style)15 Last-Chance Watch Deals Resolutely Ticking On
Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth followed up his beloved Local Hero with this lesser-known holiday-set comedy about a disc jockey (Bill Paterson) who gets dumped right before Christmas and finds himself in the midst of an ice-cream-truck turf war. It’s not the jolliest holiday aesthetic, but Forsyth’s unaffected oddball sensibility evokes the rootlessness and sometimes secret potential of a Christmas season spent without immediate family or relationship obligations. It’s not currently on any streaming services, but the Internet Archive has a nice gift for anyone interested in holiday-themed Scottish quirks.
In addition to being the best Batman movie and the best Tim Burton movie, this Christmas-set sequel is the best of several superhero installments that take place around the holidays, including Spider-Man: No Way Home and Iron Man 3. Those movies amount to pleasant window dressing compared to the all-out gothic decoration (and seasonal depression!) of Batman Returns, set in a reimagined Gotham City that production designer Bo Welch coats in snow, glowing lights, and deranged circus performers ruining the holiday party. The movie’s beautifully melancholy and conflicted take on Batman (Michael Keaton, who never eliminates a glimmer of hopefulness from his performance) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer doing career-best work) feel effortlessly Christmassy; their whole screwy relationship turns on an elegantly deployed factoid about mistletoe!
- Sales (Style)15 Last-Chance Watch Deals Resolutely Ticking On
Speaking of Iron Man 3: It’s set around Christmas because that’s a go-to move for writer-director Shane Black. He did it with his screenplay for Lethal Weapon a year before the Die Hard guys, and it’s a motif he’s returned to so frequently, it feels like a must for any grown-up Christmas-movie list (especially one of the feeling that Die Hard has become a Love Actually-level basic choice). The most authentically wintry and seasonal-feeling Shane Black Christmas is probably The Long Kiss Goodnight, because it more directly toys with the kind of wholesomeness and familial togetherness so many associate with the holiday, via a story about a sweet schoolteacher (Geena Davis) recovering her skills and memories of her career as an international assassin.
Ah, New York during the holiday season! The perfect time to have a weird conversation with your stoned wife and then wander around the city on a horny, unspecified, and ultimately unfulfilled quest for sexual exploration! If the version of the city seen in Eyes Wide Shut looks particularly dreamlike, it’s not just because of director Stanley Kubrick’s hypnotic camerawork; the whole thing was shot in England. Swapping in soundstages and other locations for New York isn’t all that unusual, but Kubrick’s eerie attention to detail make the movie look both more New York-y than most imitators, and disorientingly off. In other words, like a familiar city dressed up in a new outfit for the holidays. There’s an extra bittersweet layer to Kubrick’s elliptical, moody, sometimes very funny drama being the final on-screen collaboration between real-life couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, now very much estranged, and both doing terrific work in the Kubrick wringer.
- Sales (Style)15 Last-Chance Watch Deals Resolutely Ticking On
One of the most pervasively Christmassy movies to not have any scenes that specifically address the holiday is Wes Anderson’s family-reunion comedy, which goes so far as to lift music from A Charlie Brown Christmas (amidst its immaculate song collection that also includes “Ruby Tuesday,” “Judy Is a Punk,” and “Needle in the Hay”; is this still his best soundtrack?), feature scenes of snow falling in a picture-book version of New York City, and use a surname that’s a homophone for the German word meaning “Christmas tree.” For certain families, The Godfather became an annual Christmas rewatch; Royal Tenenbaums is that for families of millennial-led nerds (complimentary).
One of the best and most underseen movies of Seth Rogen's post-Apatow 2010s period is this comedy about a trio of lifelong friends who get together every Christmas Eve to party together, and now find that grown-up responsibilities may be pulling them apart. Reuniting with his 50/50 co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt and their director Jonathan Levine, and bringing Anthony Mackie into the fold, Rogen’s good-natured inclusiveness is all over this sentimental but solidly amusing grown-up variation on Superbad (that is to say, yet another coming-of-age narrative about the importance of tender male friendship). There are no real villains, the female characters are funny and empathetic even when they’re on the sidelines, and the whole thing is made with a genuine love that, in its more vulgar way, kinda-sorta recalls holiday classics of the 1940s.
- Sales (Style)15 Last-Chance Watch Deals Resolutely Ticking On
Streaming services have become so robotically adept at churning out holiday programming on a yearly basis – seriously, there may be more Netflix-original Christmas movies than holiday films that came out in theaters for the entirety of the 1970s – that sometimes it’s hard to recognize a new genuine classic when it emerges, especially when it doesn’t have a headline-friendly story hook. Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point very much doesn’t, unless you count the fact that children of both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg appear in it. Indie filmmaker Tyler Thomas Taormina has made a movie that’s about a large extended family getting together, seemingly somewhere on Long Island, and spending the evening together, as they clearly do every year. The hustle and bustle includes caroling, endless plates and bowls of food and snacks, snippets of serious conversations about how to address older and ailing family members, kids running wild, home videos of get-togethers past, and, in an extended section during the second half of the film, teenagers sneaking out to go party in the dead of night, which carries with it a separate sense of eerie, bittersweet ritual, with the family stuff heightening the audience’s awareness of how quickly time will pass for them. As a member of two different large Italian families, I can say this movie has the most realistic holiday ambiance I have ever seen. It’s kind of like throwing on one of those yule log videos to simulate a crackling fire, only this one is utterly, beguilingly, possibly unnervingly alive.
