The Best "Christmas Movies" That Have Nothing to Do With Christmas

Folks, on this blessed holy day for family and capitalism I’ve come to once and for all answer a question that has confounded Reddit boards for millenia: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie, or an action movie that occurs over Christmas?

I am of course kidding, but I bring it up because these unresolvable debates—over what exactly a “Christmas Movie” is or isn't, what the best Christmas movies are—is just one of the many holiday anxieties I am freed from because I’m culturally Jewish/agnostic. I love Christmas, and always have, but I have never put up a tree or observed any of the actual quasi-religious customs surrounding the holiday. Legend has it that—because these were two businesses whose hours were historically unaffected by America’s biggest nationally-recognized bank holiday—Jews celebrated Christmas by eating at Chinese restaurants and going to the movies, and for the majority of my life, this is how I’ve spent Christmas Day. For this reason, it is my contention that while my friends are freaking out about nailing the shading on the meringue mushrooms reserved for yule-log studding or getting that Herman Miller chair in time to impress their mother in law, it is we Jews and our non-gentile brethren who have gotten this holiday exactly right.

Every year, the only real questions I need to ask myself on December 25th are as follows: Dim sum, or Szechuan? Tsing Taos or a few bottles of wine paired with peking duck at a BYOB? Whenever the Knicks are playing, it’s a simple decision, me and my (culturally Muslim/atheist—it’s not just for Jews!) wife and whichever other non-observant people want to join us at a restaurant around Canal Street with a television that will play the game, always conveniently leading off the NBA’s slate at noon (the last few years we’ve fallen in love with the small bar near the entrance, and below the flat screen at Uncle Lou’s), before heading off to the movies. Historically, that meant my beloved, dearly departed Court Street—which is where I watched most of the films we’re about to revisit—but these days it could be Union Square, or Village East, or the Anjelika, or Cinema Village, or the new promising Regal above Essex Market.

It's a glorious, marathon day of running drunk around lower Manhattan watching movies in a city you and your friends briefly have largely to yourselves. (Of the many things I hated about the pandemic, the worst might be that it stole Christmas by putting theatrical moviegoing on ice. That year, as a poor and very inadequate replacement, my wife and I went to a hotel in Williamsburg with social distancing and a ventilated rooftop bar, then watched NBA in our hotel room, listened to the newly released Whole Lotta Red, split a bottle of Morgon, and generally felt like shit.) I happen to live in New York, but I’m sure wherever you may be in America there are Chinese restaurants and cinemas to frequent if you want to join us in spirit.

And this is what’s so beautiful about the non-observant film lover’s ironclad definition of a Christmas movie: It’s a movie that comes out on Christmas. That’s it. These movies frequently have nothing to do with gifts or trees or guys in red suits, or glazed ham, but sickos like my wife and I will forever after think of them—and refer to them—as “Christmas movies.”

It’s a date that has become a fascinating inflection point for Hollywood—the last major release day of the year, often reserved for a big prestige play that might’ve missed the festival circuit, or a four-quadrant blockbuster, or a family flick, and often the slate is some permutation of all three. Some of these films wind up becoming hits that retroactively define that year in film, some are huge disappointments and bombs that inspire heightened levels of anger and disdain because they can’t deliver on a yearlong, inescapable advertising campaign and literally ruin Christmas. It’s always a gamble, and the surprise is part of the fun.

So in honor of what has become the greatest moviegoing day of the year for the rest of us, here is my personal ranking of the best Christmas releases (defined as dropping no earlier than December 18th) this century. It’s some deeply subjective equation conflating the quality of the film with the experience of seeing it for the first time, on Christmas Day, in the theater. (For your sake, I only blurbed the bottom 10 if I had something worthwhile to add to Christmas Movie Discourse.)

Merry Christmas to all, however you and your loved ones may observe the holiday. If you need me, I’ll be at A Complete Unknown somewhere downtown, mid-afternoon.

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In retrospect, truly sick to unleash this on the unsuspecting American public who just wanted to see Zach Effron and Jeremy Allen White in spandex on Christmas Day. This film taught me that, at least at this stage in my life, what you want from a Christmas release is something fun. An epic blockbuster with dark moments, maybe, but generally something warm and feel-good that will be heightened by your good cheer. This—a relentlessly bleak Greek tragedy about the inheritance of generational curses that reduced me to a sobbing husk—was not that.

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A part of the Christmas-moviegoing experience means there may be situations in which you are more fucked up for a film than you intended to be. I don’t smoke weed anymore and never really liked ingesting, but in honor of the holiday and a film I was told would be a bacchanal for the senses, I inadvertently had what I thought was one dose of a weed cookie but ended up being four doses. I remember just sort of melting throughout the course of this film, which does contain some truly wild sequences that were certainly elevated by my brain being reduced to marshland. I vaguely remember planning how I was going to live at the Essex Regal for the rest of my life because I knew my legs would never work again, and briefly dying and going to hell during the grotesque Tobey Maguire excursion. I’ve never been able to bring myself to revisit the film.

This ass-whipper dropped when a lot of people were still working out whether or not it was safe to go back to the theater, which I assume is part of why it isn’t widely regarded as a great legasequel. If you day-and-dated this at home, I feel sorry for you. Saw this at the greatest movie theater on Earth, the Upper West Side AMC iMAX, and it fucking ripped. I saw it with Jayson Buford, and even he, a great and hard-to-please critic, agreed. It’s an experience I’d argue makes a case not just for the superiority of in-theater viewing, but for in-theater Christmas viewing as a force multiplier.

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Most Christmas moviegoers were probably at Rise of Skywalker in 2019, but I’m not trying to think or talk about that dogshit ever again. Also, this was the movie we actually saw that year on Christmas, and it rules. A smart and fun reimagining of a classic I didn’t realize had so much to say about the current state of the world, it showed us definitively Gerwig can do anything. My lasting memory from this was I didn’t realize Bob Odenkirk was in it, and when he shows up on screen I inadvertently exclaimed, “Odenkirk!” at my afternoon screening, and it got a great laugh. Well overdue for a rewatch.

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Kind of surprising we don’t have more Christmas musicals. Seems like a great day for it, but ironically it feels like most musicals, and most Christmas movies, drop well before the actual holiday, to take full advantage of people seeking family/traditional holiday-geared content all season. Which is a shame. Nothing says Christmas like Eddie Murphy going nuclear as a song and dance man, in a performance that should’ve won him an Oscar.

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Just a fucking classic. A classic western, a classic Charles Portis adaptation that actually finally nails the joy of reading his prose, classic Coens. Who doesn’t love True Grit? Many MVP contenders here—I’m still waiting for Hailee Steinfeld to live up to the incredible talent she displayed in this introduction—but basically everything related to Matt Damon’s bounty hunter, down to anyone simply referring to him by his name (“La Boeuf) cracks me up.

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Kind of a perfect journey of a Christmas film—a balance of comedy and drama from the era when Zemeckis could not miss and Hanks was our greatest movie star, summoning every ounce of charm he’d need to carry a movie by himself.

AVATAR, 2009. TM & Copyright ©20th Century Fox. All rights reserved/Courtesy Everett Collection©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

What an event. What a visual feast. 2009 was the one time I actually went to a Knicks Christmas game in person—but then it was back to Court Street for this, a film I was completely mesmerized by, and then (as if zapped with the Men In Black brain eraser) never thought of again until the sequel dropped.

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A franchise that I assume takes place in a universe where Christmas doesn’t exist (they apparently have Christmaslike holidays), but maybe the franchise I most associate with the holiday season, to the point that every year I’ll get a big Lego project, make a warm beverage, and spend a few nights in December putting together Legos and watching the whole Rings franchise with my kids. It speaks to the point of this exercise, how films that aren’t necessarily Christmas related come to represent the season in your mind through some nostalgic alchemy. Tack a few more endings onto this final installment. It should never end.

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Yes, there are “better” films than this one ranked lower on this list, but it’s a real “You weren’t there” situation if you don’t understand why this comes in so high. For an hour and change, there were few experiences in my life as intoxicating as seeing this for the first time. Briefly, all things were possible. They had successfully revived and recreated everything I loved about the first films. It was funny, it was smart, it was a blast, all the old faces were there and the new cast folded in seamlessly. I was crawling across the ceiling like Hereditary. It all came crashing down—but first, a Christmas miracle.

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I’ve written about this film for GQ before so I won’t belabor the point. What I will say is all the brilliant history and context the film lays under its subject matter wasn’t what I was focused on as a high school student. It was Will’s raw charisma, Jamie leaving it all on screen, the pure emotional high you get as Ali runs through the streets of Kinshasa. It’s a big, bold, transcendent and yes, fun sports movie—the pinnacle of Christmas prestige.

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An over-hated film that probably doesn’t objectively deserve this spot, so I need to point out a few notable contextual issues at play here. Tarantino has been an intermittent Christmas release guy. Jackie Brown was his first, Django was his second, Hateful Eight his third. So it’s a mixed bag—but this one was Tarantino coming off Inglorious Basterds, it’s a spaghetti Western with Jamie Foxx taking a role originally written for Will Smith, it’s DiCaprio in his first movie with Tarantino as a big bad, and there was an incredible amount of anticipation around it. And here’s the thing: It’s not a profound film, but it’s a big, bloody, messy, crazy swing, running back the historical-revenge genre recipe that made Basterds so groundbreaking. Recall the many (absolutely awful) Sam Jack laugh lines, the Rick Ross needle drop, the “Did I just see what I think I saw?” when DiCaprio slices his hand open in the middle of that showstopper monologue. In the moment, it was electric.

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Nothing can beat the pure adrenaline rush, the sheer joy of your first time watching a movie that you know within the first minutes is going to be in your life forever. The improv, the sloppy editing, the drugs, the sex, the hedonism, the shit-talking. What I remember about this screening: Explosive laughter. People getting up and cheering at the speeches. People rolling around on the floor. It was an out-of-body experience, getting a masterpiece on Christmas. It’s the type of religious experience you spend a lifetime in search of, then never forget.