This is the second list. The main twenty, with It’s a Wonderful Life, Die Hard, Home Alone and Gremlins on it, lives at The Greatest Christmas Films and nothing here repeats anything there. What follows is eighteen more, including two sequels that outgrew the originals sitting on that page.
The films themselves settle the argument about what counts as a Christmas film, and the test is simple. Does the season do structural work, or is it set dressing? A story about people forced together, about debts coming due, about a deadline that can’t move, is using December for something.
Which is why the action entries below are here without apology. Lethal Weapon opens on a Christmas tree lot and is about a man who intends to kill himself before the holiday. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3 are Shane Black using the season the way he always has, as a period of forced sentiment that his characters can’t meet.
My patience for Christmas movies runs out fast. Most of them are greeting cards with a running time, and a studio that sprinkles fake snow on a romance and calls it a holiday picture is insulting everybody who buys a ticket. The eighteen films here deserve their December. Some of them are mean and a couple are violent, and any one of them beats another movie about a big-city executive learning to love a small town.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year.
1. Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
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"A department store Santa on trial, and the film takes the legal question seriously."
Miracle on 34th Street is first because it resolves a fantasy premise with an institutional fact and not with a miracle. A man claiming to be Kris Kringle faces a competency hearing, and the defense wins by having the Post Office deliver his mail.
That’s a real evidentiary argument. A federal agency has recognized the address, which constitutes state acknowledgement, and the judge rules accordingly. The film never asks the audience to believe anything supernatural has occurred. Fox released it in May 1947 because Darryl Zanuck believed audiences attended more films in warm weather, and the marketing concealed that it was a Christmas picture at all, including trailers that showed none of the seasonal material. The film takes the form of a legal question: whether the state of New York can be made to concede that a man is Santa Claus without perjuring itself. The Post Office resolution is the best joke in it and turns on a bureaucratic technicality and not on belief. Edmund Gwenn won Best Supporting Actor and appeared as Santa in the actual Macy’s parade, filmed live, with one take available. I’d hand this Christmas movie to anybody who thinks the genre is soft. It trusts its audience to enjoy a legal argument, and the Post Office scene delights me. My one gripe is with Fox, which hid the Christmas material in the trailers as if the best part of the picture were something to be embarrassed about.
2. A Christmas Story (1983)
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"A modest release that became a fixture because a cable channel ran it for twenty-four hours."
A Christmas Story is here partly on merit and partly as the clearest case of distribution creating a classic. Bob Clark adapted Jean Shepherd’s autobiographical stories into a 1940 childhood organized around one obsessive campaign for an air rifle.
Shepherd narrates as the adult version of the boy. That lets the film be affectionate and unsparing at once. The narrator can mock the child without the film mocking him, and the period detail comes from somebody who was there and not from research.
It did modest business in November 1983 and the reputation was built almost entirely by the TBS twenty-four-hour marathon starting in 1997. Clark had directed Porky’s the year before and Black Christmas nine years earlier. That’s a range no other director on this page has.
Bob Clark had made Black Christmas and Porky’s. It’s a filmography nobody would predict from this. The narration is Jean Shepherd reading his own material. That’s why the tone never slips into sentiment. It failed on release and became a fixture only after a television channel began running it for twenty-four hours. That’s an accident of scheduling.
3. Trading Places (1983)
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"A one-dollar bet about nature and nurture, settled on the commodities exchange floor."
Trading Places uses Christmas structurally and not decoratively. That’s why it’s this high. Two wealthy brokers wager one dollar on whether a con artist and an Ivy League executive can be swapped, and the film never lets the audience forget the amount. The season does the emotional work. The humiliation, the family gathering, the year ending, and Dan Aykroyd’s drunk Santa eating a stolen salmon through his false beard on a bus. That’s the single most desolate image in any Christmas film.
The orange juice futures ending is also correct. The mechanism by which Valentine and Winthorpe ruin the Dukes is real commodities trading and the film explains it clearly enough that economists have used the sequence to teach. The bet that drives the plot is for one dollar, which the film reveals late and which is the cruellest detail in it.
Landis shoots Philadelphia in real winter and the commodities floor sequence was filmed at the real exchange.
Denholm Elliott’s Coleman is the only person in the film with any decency and is given almost nothing to say about it.
The Dukes are the ugliest villains in any holiday film I can think of, two rich men who’d wreck a pair of lives for a dollar, and watching them go broke on that trading floor is about as satisfying as a movie gets. Coleman gets shortchanged. The one decent man in the whole picture barely gets a line about his decency, and I’d have given him a scene.
4. Lethal Weapon (1987)
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"A suicidal detective at Christmas, which is the whole reason the film works."
Lethal Weapon qualifies on stronger grounds than the films people usually argue about. It opens on a Christmas tree lot, Jingle Bell Rock plays over the first scene, and Riggs has a specific intention to kill himself before the holiday. That’s the season doing structural work. The deadline is emotional and not plot-driven, and it’s what gives the partnership stakes instead of banter. Murtaugh isn’t just acquiring a difficult colleague, he’s acquiring one who has decided not to survive December.
Shane Black wrote it and established here what he’d use throughout his career: Christmas as a period of enforced sentiment his characters can’t meet.
The opening has Riggs alone with a service weapon in his mouth on a caravan floor before the audience knows him at all.
Murtaugh is the protagonist because he’s the family and the retirement, and Riggs is the disruption entering his life.
Shane Black wrote it at twenty-four and the Christmas setting is used continuously and not as decoration.
5. Meet John Doe (1941)
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"Capra’s darkest film, and the Christmas Eve climax is a man on a ledge."
Meet John Doe is the least reassuring thing Capra directed and it’s on this list because the climax is a suicide attempt on Christmas Eve. A columnist invents an everyman who threatens to jump in protest at the state of the country, and then has to produce him when the public responds.
An industrialist capturing the manufactured populist movement he funds is the film’s subject. That’s a considerably harder subject than anything in It’s a Wonderful Life. Capra couldn’t settle the ending and shot five, screening several and asking audiences. The released version has the crowd talk the man down, and Capra remained dissatisfied with it for the rest of his life.
Capra couldn’t find an ending and shot several, and the released version is the one he disliked least instead of the one he wanted.
The premise is a fabricated letter to a newspaper that creates a national movement. That’s a sharper idea than Capra’s reputation suggests.
Barbara Stanwyck plays the journalist who invents him and the film is clear that she does it for the money.
For me, this Capra picture is more interesting than the famous one, because it’s willing to show a public movement being bought outright by the man paying for it. That still disturbs me. The ending lets me down. Capra knew it didn’t work, and you can feel a film that never decided how to get its man off the ledge.
6. Holiday Inn (1942)
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"An inn that opens only on holidays, and White Christmas was written for it."
Holiday Inn is structurally clever in a way nobody discusses. Crosby converts a Connecticut farm into a venue that works only on public holidays. That hands the film a musical number per occasion and a built-in calendar. Berlin wrote White Christmas for this film and Crosby introduced it in August 1942, eight months after Pearl Harbor, to an audience with people overseas. It became the best-selling single ever recorded.
There’s a Lincoln’s Birthday blackface number here that’s indefensible and is now cut from most broadcasts, and it’s the reason the picture is discussed less than its successor. White Christmas was written for this film and not for the one named after it, and won Best Original Song.
The whole setup is an inn that opens only on public holidays. That’s a structure that produces a number per holiday. One sequence is performed in blackface and is now cut from most broadcasts, which the film’s reputation has to carry.
7. White Christmas (1954)
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"The first VistaVision release, built around a song that was already a standard."
White Christmas is the rare musical assembled backwards from its hit. Paramount built an entire production around a song Crosby had introduced twelve years earlier in a different film, and made it the first VistaVision release to justify the budget.
The plot is two army veterans turned singing act following a sister act to a failing Vermont inn owned by their former commanding officer, and the general’s material is the part that works. A man who commanded a division reduced to an innkeeper nobody needs.
Danny Kaye was the third choice after Astaire and Donald O’Connor and is the best thing in it.
It was the first film released in VistaVision and the format was developed to compete with CinemaScope.
Its plot is thin and the film knows it, existing to deliver numbers and a reunion for a general nobody has thanked. Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen are given the strongest material and Vera-Ellen’s singing was dubbed throughout.
Danny Kaye is the reason I’d sit down with this one again, and the general is the reason it moves me at all. A man who commanded a division and ends up running an inn nobody needs deserves the reunion the film gives him. Everything around that is thin as tissue paper, and I wish Paramount had spent some of the VistaVision money on a script.
8. A Christmas Carol (1984)
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"The best Scrooge, in a television film, and it is George C. Scott."
No screen Dickens beats this one, and the reason is one interpretive decision. Scott plays Scrooge as a competent businessman and not as a grotesque. He’s sharp, articulate, and his positions on charity and the poor law are coherent instead of cackling.
That makes the argument work. A Scrooge who’s plainly good at his work and not wrong about business forces the film to engage with what the business costs, and his conversion means something because he had a position to abandon.
Production took place in Shrewsbury, CBS broadcast it in December 1984, and Scott reportedly took the part because he thought every previous Scrooge had played the man as mad and not as convinced.
George C. Scott plays Scrooge as a man who thinks he’s right and not as a miser. That’s the reading the text supports and adaptations avoid.
In America it was a television film and released theatrically in Britain. That’s why the production values are higher than the format suggests.
The Cratchit household is played without sentiment and the Christmas Yet to Come sequence is frightening.
9. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)
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"John Hughes writing about a man whose competence at nothing is the point."
Christmas Vacation makes the list on structure and not on gags. Clark Griswold’s plan for a perfect family Christmas collapses across a series of escalating failures, and every one of them is his own fault. The bonus cheque is the spine. Clark has already spent money he hasn’t received on a swimming pool, which converts a sequence of disasters into a plot with a third act, and the jelly-of-the-month breakdown is the payoff to ninety minutes of accumulating pressure.
Hughes wrote it from his own National Lampoon short story and it’s the only entry in the Vacation series with a real emotional argument: Clark’s need for the perfect Christmas is about his own father instead of his children.
John Hughes wrote it and the film is structured as a series of escalating domestic humiliations with no plot to speak of.
The lighting sequence required around twenty-five thousand bulbs and the electrical load was real enough to require dedicated supply.
Chevy Chase plays Clark as somebody whose optimism is a form of aggression. That’s what makes the rant land.
Clark Griswold is a man I’d cross the street to avoid, and I still root for him every minute. The bonus check gives the chaos a spine, and the jelly-of-the-month rant deserves every second it gets. I lose interest a little in the stretches that are gags and nothing else, because the film is at its best when every disaster traces back to that swimming pool.
10. Die Hard 2 (1990)
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"The second-best Die Hard, and being not the original is the whole problem and part of the charm."
Die Hard 2 is on this list because it’s openly aware of its own situation. Harlin moves McClane to an airport at Christmas with his wife again in the air above him, and repeats the original’s structure without pretending otherwise. McClane says so out loud, asking how the same thing can happen to the same guy twice, and the film gets a surprising amount of mileage from a man who can’t believe his own luck. That self-awareness separates it from the later sequels.
The Christmas material is real and not incidental. Holly is stranded above a closed airport, the terminal is full of people trying to get home, and the season is the reason everybody is there.
McClane says out loud that he can’t believe the same thing is happening to the same guy twice. That’s what separates it from the later sequels.
Holly is stranded in the air above a closed airport and the terminal is full of people trying to get home. Renny Harlin replaced McTiernan and the staging is noticeably less legible, most obviously in the walkway shootout.
11. Home Alone 2 (1992)
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"The rare sequel better than a very good original, and it is about loneliness."
Home Alone 2 is better than the first film and the reason is the city. Putting the same child alone in New York in 1992 removes the safety of a suburban house and replaces it with a place that doesn’t notice him. Underneath the Stooges and Laurel and Hardy violence, the film is about being unobserved. The pigeon lady material takes that seriously, gives the boy somebody who’s also invisible, and the film treats her loneliness as real and not as a lesson for him.
It’s also a record of a New York that no longer exists, shot across Manhattan in the early nineties. That accounts for a major part of its continued audience. It repeats the first film’s structure almost exactly and relocates it to New York, which the film acknowledges through the same two burglars. The Plaza sequence and the Trump cameo have acquired a significance nobody involved intended.
The traps are considerably more violent than the first film’s and the pigeon lady is the only real new idea in it.
The pigeon lady is the part I care about.
The film treats a lonely woman in a city that walks right past her as a person, and that lifts the film above a rerun of the first one. I lose interest in the traps. They’ve gone from cartoonish to nasty, and somewhere in the attack on the burglars my laughing turns into wincing.
12. Elf (2003)
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"The last live-action Christmas film to enter the canon, and it did it on sincerity."
Elf is the most recent film to join the seasonal canon and it managed it by refusing irony in a period that had almost nothing else. Favreau’s third feature has a human raised at the North Pole arriving in New York to find a father who doesn’t want one. Will Ferrell plays Buddy entirely without a wink. There’s no moment where the performance signals that the character is ridiculous, no aside to the audience, and the film is unembarrassed on his behalf throughout, which almost no comedy of 2003 was willing to do.
Favreau used forced perspective and practical stop-motion for the North Pole and not digital effects, deliberately referencing Rankin/Bass, and James Caan plays the father as unpleasant and not as merely busy. Favreau shoots the North Pole sequences using forced perspective and stop-motion and not digital effects, deliberately referencing Rankin/Bass. Ferrell plays Buddy with total sincerity and never once acknowledges the joke. That’s why the film works on adults.
James Caan is playing it entirely straight against him. That’s the correct casting and the reason the emotional ending works.
13. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
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"Shane Black’s directorial debut, a Christmas noir that narrates itself badly on purpose."
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the purest version of the tone Black had been building toward since Lethal Weapon. A small-time thief stumbles into a Los Angeles acting career and a Christmas-season murder investigation.
The narration is the device. Downey tells the story badly, forgets things, goes back, apologizes, and admits he’s been withholding. That’s a parody of hardboiled voiceover conducted by somebody who has clearly read a great deal of it.
Downey’s first lead after his legal difficulties, it directly preceded Iron Man. Val Kilmer’s Gay Perry is the best supporting performance in any Black film.
Downey narrates badly, forgets things, goes back and apologizes to the audience. That parodies the convention while delivering the information. Underneath, the plot is a real Chandler-shaped mystery with a missing sister and a body that shouldn’t be there, and it resolves properly. This was Downey’s first lead after his legal difficulties and directly preceded Iron Man, and Val Kilmer’s Gay Perry is the best supporting performance in any Shane Black film.
Of the three Shane Black films on this page, this is the one where he sounds most like himself, and Downey’s narrator is the reason. He’s bad at telling the story and knows it, and that’s funnier than any smooth wiseguy voiceover I can name. My reservation is that the film is so pleased with its own cleverness that it wears thin, and it asks me to find it charming more often than it earns.
14. Christmas in Connecticut (1945)
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"A food columnist who cannot cook has to produce the farm, husband and baby she invented."
Christmas in Connecticut is a screwball built on a lie that grows. That’s the most reliable comic structure there is. Barbara Stanwyck writes a homemaking column about a domestic life she doesn’t have and is required to host her publisher at a farm she doesn’t own. Sydney Greenstreet as the publisher drives the plot. He keeps innocently tightening the situation, each demand reasonable and each one impossible, and the film never lets the pressure release.
It sits at a 7 because the romance resolves conventionally and the film loses its nerve in the final reel, but Stanwyck is doing precision comic work throughout. Barbara Stanwyck plays a food columnist who can’t cook and has invented an entire farm, a husband and a baby for her readership.
It’s a wartime film about a returning sailor, and an entire household sustains the deception by conspiring to maintain it.
Peter Godfrey directs it as a farce and the film is structurally closer to a Feydeau piece than to a Christmas picture.
15. The Santa Clause (1994)
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"A man kills Santa and is contractually obliged to replace him, which is a darker premise than the film admits."
The Santa Clause has a premise the film never fully confronts. A divorced executive startles Santa off his roof, killing him, and discovers a clause in the suit transferring the job including an irreversible physical transformation.
That’s body horror played as comedy. Scott gains weight he can’t lose, his hair whitens, his beard regrows when shaved, and his employer, family and legal system all treat him as having a breakdown.
Tim Allen made it during Home Improvement and it was Disney’s highest-grossing live action film of the year. The custody subplot is more hostile than a family film usually permits.
A legal premise drives it. A man puts on a coat, and a clause printed on a card contractually binds him. That’s a good joke.
The physical transformation is played as body horror in a children’s film, with weight gain and beard growth he can’t stop.
Tim Allen was at the peak of his television success and the film made enough to produce two sequels and a series.
I enjoy this one, mostly because it never admits how dark its premise is. A man kills Santa by accident and a line of fine print turns him into the replacement whether he likes it or not, and I think that’s a terrific joke.
What keeps it at a seven for me is the custody fight. It’s more hostile than the fun around it can carry, and it sours scenes that should be light.
16. Iron Man 3 (2013)
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"The only Marvel film with a sustained Christmas setting, because Shane Black directed it."
Iron Man 3 is the most distinctive-feeling film in the Marvel franchise and the seasonal framing is entirely the reason. Black brought his Christmas-noir tone wholesale into a property that had no interest in it. Stark spends the film with panic attacks, no working armour, and a child sidekick in Tennessee. It’s a Shane Black structure instead of a superhero one. The Mandarin reveal remains the boldest adaptation choice the studio has made and the most divisive. It’s the only Marvel picture where a director’s voice is louder than the franchise’s. That’s why it’s either the best or the worst of the Iron Man films depending on who you ask.
The Christmas setting and the voiceover are Shane Black’s signature and sit oddly inside a franchise that had no tone for either.
The strongest sequence has Stark with no suit at all, working out of a small-town garage with hardware store components.
The Mandarin reveal divided audiences permanently and is a good joke about how threat gets manufactured.
17. Krampus (2015)
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"A horror comedy that takes the folklore seriously and the family even more so."
Krampus works because the summoning is earned. A hostile family Christmas, with real contempt between the two branches, attracts the Central European anti-Santa, and the film is explicit that the family’s own unpleasantness is what called him.
Dougherty used practical creature work and puppetry wherever possible, and the animated sequence explaining the folklore is the best-realized thing in it. It sits at a 7 because the tonal balance between comedy and horror never fully settles. That’s the standard problem with the hybrid. Michael Dougherty had made Trick ‘r Treat and applies the same anthology instinct to a single house under siege. The creature work is largely practical, including the gingerbread men and the jack-in-the-box. That’s why it reads as unpleasant and not cute. The ending is bleak and the studio reportedly wanted it changed, and the ambiguity that survived is the best thing in the film.
Somebody had the nerve to make a Christmas film where a family’s nastiness has consequences. The practical creatures are properly unpleasant, and that ending is the bravest choice in it. My complaint is the jokes. Every time the film builds some dread it cuts to a gag, and the two halves never settle into one movie.
18. Violent Night (2022)
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"Santa as a disillusioned former Viking, trapped in a siege picture."
Violent Night commits fully to one idea. That’s the minimum requirement for a film like this. David Harbour’s Santa is a former Viking warrior who has lost faith in the job and finds himself inside a hostage situation at a wealthy family’s compound. The Home Alone sequence is the best joke in any recent Christmas film. A child applies that film’s methods to actual mercenaries with realistic results, and the film is clear-eyed about what a paint can to the head does.
The backstory is the weakest element and the film is honest enough to keep it brief.
David Harbour’s worn-out Santa gives me more pleasure than any jolly one I can name. The attic sequence is a nasty little joke that pays off in full, and I prefer a film that commits this hard to a clever one that hedges. The backstory is dull, though, and it’s the one stretch where my attention drifts. Santa is a burnt-out warrior who has been doing this for centuries, no longer believes in any of it, and is drinking through the shift.
The Die Hard structure is deliberate and acknowledged, including a child setting traps in an attic. David Harbour plays the exhaustion entirely straight, and the writers had previously made the Sonic films.
Those are my eighteen, and every one of them uses December for something. The ones I’d push on you first are Trading Places and Lethal Weapon, because they understand that the holidays put people under pressure and then they watch what those people do. A Christmas film that only wants to make me feel cozy is wasting the season, and I’m done giving those films my evenings.
