The seasonal film has a reputation problem. It is assumed to be soft, interchangeable and produced to a formula, and a great deal of what gets made every year is exactly that.
The good ones are not. This list includes a film about corporate cowardice and an attempted suicide, a family negotiating a succession by wounding each other, a homeless man in Tokyo who abandoned his daughter, and one picture where the Christmas lighting exists to make the alienation worse.
What they share is that the season does structural work: supplying the pressure, the deadline, the obligation to be with people, or the contrast that makes loneliness visible. A film where Christmas is only decoration is not on this list.
Each entry carries a note on what a writer can take from it. Ranked, argued, and open to disagreement.
The Greatest Christmas Films
1. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
► Read the full review of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
⭐ 8/10
James Stewart
A man who has given up every ambition he ever stated stands on a bridge in the snow, and is shown what the town would have been without him. The famous fifteen minutes are the end of a two-hour film in which nothing he wants happens. He does not travel, does not build, does not leave, and watches everyone around him do the things he intended to do.
It lost money, ended the independent production company its director had staked everything on, won none of its several Academy nominations, and appeared in an FBI memorandum on communist influence in film because the villain was a banker. It became permanent thirty years later because a copyright renewal was filed incorrectly and television stations could run it for nothing. The full account is at the link above.
2. Scrooge (1951)
► Read the full review of Scrooge (1951)
⭐ 10/10
⭐ 10/10
Alastair Sim
The Dickens story, done straight, in black and white, by a cast who play it as a ghost story instead of a fable. Alastair Sim’s miser is genuinely unpleasant in the early scenes and genuinely terrified in the later ones, and the film gives real weight to the middle section about how he became what he is.
It is the best of the many adaptations because it commits to the darkness. The redemption reads as relief instead of sentiment, and Sim’s performance in the final act, where the man is almost hysterical with reprieve, is the closest any version has come to what the text describes. The publishing story behind the book is covered separately at A Christmas Carol Day.
3. The Apartment (1960)
► Read the full review of The Apartment (1960)
⭐ 10/10
Jack Lemmon
An office clerk lends his flat to senior executives for their affairs, hoping it will get him promoted, and falls for the elevator operator one of them is using. It is a Christmas film about corporate cowardice, loneliness and an attempted suicide, and it won best picture.
The seasonal setting sharpens every isolation in it: the office party, the bar on Christmas Eve, a man alone in a flat he cannot use. The last line is one of the most efficient endings in cinema and works precisely because it refuses to say the other thing, the thing the audience has spent two hours waiting to hear.
4. Die Hard (1988)
► Read the full review of Die Hard (1988)
⭐ 10+/10
⭐ 10+/10
Bruce Willis
A New York detective flies to Los Angeles to see his estranged wife at her office Christmas party, and armed men take the building. The argument about whether it counts as a Christmas film is tedious and the answer is simple: the holiday supplies the plot’s conditions.
Christmas explains why he is in the building, why the offices are half empty, why the response is slow, why the villains chose that night, and what he stands to lose. Remove the season and the film does not work. Alan Rickman’s antagonist is the other reason it has lasted: courteous, intelligent and never once stupid in service of the plot.
5. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
► Read the full review of The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
⭐ 9/10
James Stewart
Two assistants in a Budapest leather goods shop dislike each other intensely and are unknowingly exchanging love letters through a personal advertisement. The premise has been remade repeatedly and the original is the sharpest, largely because the shop is a real workplace with a real economy.
Everybody in it is worried about their job. The owner is worried about his marriage, an employee is dismissed and the film follows what that does to him, and the Christmas Eve resolution lands because ninety minutes have established exactly how much both of these people need it. It is a romantic comedy in which the stakes are employment.
6. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
► Read the full review of Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
⭐ 9/10
Judy Garland
A family in 1903 faces the prospect of leaving their home for New York in the year the World’s Fair is coming to town. It is a musical in colour about a comfortable household, and the Christmas sequence at its center is far sadder than the film’s reputation allows.
An older sister sings a song written to console a small child about losing everything she knows, and the child then goes into the garden and destroys her own snowmen. It was made during the war for an audience full of people who had been moved away from home, and that is what the scene is really about.
7. Gremlins (1984)
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⭐ 9/10
Zach Galligan
A boy receives an unusual pet for Christmas with three rules attached, and the rules get broken in order. The suburban Christmas is rendered lovingly and then systematically wrecked, and the film never resolves the tension between being a family comedy and being a genuine horror film.
It contains a monologue in which a character explains why she hates Christmas, involving a father, a chimney and a broken neck, which studio executives wanted cut. Keeping it is why the film has lasted. The tonal whiplash of that speech landing in the middle of a creature comedy is the whole character of the picture.
8. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
► Read the full review of The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
⭐ 9/10
Michael Caine
The Dickens story, performed by Muppets, narrated by a frog playing the author. It is the most faithful adaptation of the actual text in existence, which almost nobody expects, with long stretches of dialogue taken verbatim and a narrator device that solves the prose problem every other version ignores.
That problem is that a great deal of what makes the book work is Dickens’s narration, and film adaptations usually discard it. Putting the author on screen as a character lets the film keep the prose. Michael Caine plays Scrooge entirely straight, never once acknowledging that he is acting opposite felt, and that decision is the whole method.
9. Home Alone (1990)
► Read the full review of Home Alone (1990)
⭐ 7.5/10
Macaulay Culkin
A boy is accidentally left behind when his large family flies to Paris for Christmas, having wished the night before that they would all disappear. The structure is cleaner than its reputation: the first hour is about a child who got what he asked for, and the slapstick only arrives once that has been established.
The neighbour subplot is the reason it endures. An old man the boy has been told to fear turns out to be estranged from his own son, and their conversation in a church is the emotional center of the film. Remove that thread and the picture is a cartoon. Keep it and there is an actual argument about family underneath the paint cans.
10. Tokyo Godfathers (2003)
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⭐ 9/10
Toru Emori
Three homeless people in Tokyo, a middle-aged alcoholic, a trans woman and a teenage runaway, find an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve and set out across the city to return it. Every one of the three left a family behind, and the search for the child’s parents becomes a tour of what each of them cannot go back to.
It is warm without being soft about what its characters have lost, and it is very funny in places. The animation is precise about a real city in winter, and the film treats destitution as a circumstance instead of a moral condition. Satoshi Kon made four features before dying at forty-six, and this is the most generous of them.
11. The Lion in Winter (1968)
► Read the full review of The Lion in Winter (1968)
⭐ 10/10
Peter O’Toole
Henry II gathers his wife, whom he keeps imprisoned, and his three sons at Chinon for Christmas in 1183 to settle the succession. What follows is two hours of a family negotiating, lying, forming alliances and dismantling each other, with the crown of England as the stake and nobody exempt.
It is the most vicious Christmas film ever made and it is extremely funny. The dialogue is anachronistic on purpose, closer to a modern stage play than a historical drama, which lets the wounds land without period distance. Anyone who finds seasonal films saccharine should start here, and should be warned that it is entirely without warmth.
12. Carol (2015)
► Read the full review of Carol (2015)
⭐ 9/10
⭐ 9/10
Cate Blanchett
A shop assistant working the toy counter in a Manhattan department store at Christmas 1952 meets an older woman buying a present for her daughter, and they begin an affair that neither can name aloud. The season is the setting for the meeting and the constraint on everything that follows.
The whole film is shaped by seasonal light: shop windows, snow through glass, cars at night, the specific quality of December in a city. It is a film about what two people can and cannot say to each other, and almost everything important happens in a glance across a room or a hand on a shoulder.
13. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
► Read the full review of A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
⭐ 10/10
Peter Robbins
A boy who finds the season depressing is put in charge of the school play and buys the wrong tree. Twenty-five minutes long, and it opens with a child stating plainly that he feels sad at Christmas and does not know why, which almost no children’s programming would do now.
The network expected a disaster. Real children’s voices instead of trained adults, a jazz trio instead of an orchestra, no laugh track, and a long uninterrupted reading from the gospel of Luke in the middle of it. Every one of those decisions was argued against and every one is why the thing is still watched sixty years later.
14. Scrooged (1988)
► Read the full review of Scrooged (1988)
⭐ 7/10
Bill Murray
A cynical television executive is visited by three spirits while producing a live Christmas broadcast. It is the best modern reworking of the Dickens story because it understands that the man has to be genuinely repellent for the ending to mean anything, and Bill Murray plays him without ever asking to be liked.
The tonal control slips in places and the final speech, improvised at length to camera, is a famous mess that some people find sincere and others find excruciating. It is on the list anyway because the first ninety minutes are sharp, cruel and very funny about the television industry.
15. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
► Read the full review of The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
⭐ 10/10
Danny Elfman
The king of Halloween Town discovers Christmas, does not understand it, and decides to run it himself. The premise is much better than the visuals suggest: it is a film about a competent person doing something badly because he has mistaken enthusiasm for comprehension.
The stop-motion took three years and it shows in every frame. Whether it is a Christmas film or a Halloween one has never been settled and does not need to be, and the ambiguity is a large part of why it has two seasons of shelf life instead of one.
16. Remember the Night (1940)
► Read the full review of Remember the Night (1940)
⭐ 8/10
Barbara Stanwyck
A prosecutor gets a shoplifter’s trial postponed until after Christmas, feels responsible, and ends up taking her home to his family in Indiana for the holiday. The premise sounds like a comedy and the film keeps turning serious, particularly in one scene with the woman’s own mother that is genuinely cold.
Written by Preston Sturges just before he began directing, and almost forgotten. It puts two contrasting family Christmases side by side, one warm and one not, and refuses to sentimentalize the difference or to suggest that the warm one was available to everybody. The ending is more difficult than the genre requires.
17. Bad Santa (2003)
► Read the full review of Bad Santa (2003)
⭐ 8/10
Billy Bob Thornton
An alcoholic safecracker works as a department store Santa every December so he can rob the place on Christmas Eve, and a strange, relentless child attaches himself to him. It commits fully to being unpleasant, which is why it is one of very few Christmas comedies with genuine stakes.
Not for a family viewing under any circumstances. It is here because it is the strongest of the anti-Christmas films and, importantly, it is not cynical. The redemption is minimal, hard-won and almost entirely unspoken, and the film gives the character nothing he has not paid for.
18. The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
► Read the full review of The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
⭐ 8/10
Cary Grant
An angel is sent to help a bishop raise money for a cathedral and becomes fond of the bishop’s wife. The film looks like a conventional seasonal picture and is considerably stranger than it appears, because the angel is not entirely benevolent and the marriage he is meant to be helping has gone cold.
Cary Grant plays him with an edge most versions of that character lack: charming, slightly proprietorial, and visibly reluctant to leave. The film declines to resolve several things it raises, including how much of the wife’s unhappiness was ever going to be fixed by a cathedral fundraiser.
19. Klaus (2019)
► Read the full review of Klaus (2019)
⭐ 9/10
Jason Schwartzman
A spoiled postman is exiled to a bleak island town where two clans have feuded for generations and nobody sends letters. He discovers a reclusive toymaker in a house full of unsold toys, and constructs a Santa origin story out of entirely ordinary causes, with no magic required until the very end.
The feud is the actual subject and the film takes it seriously: two families who have inherited a hatred neither can explain, and children who have never spoken to each other. The animation is hand-drawn with lighting techniques nobody had applied that way before, and it looks unlike anything else.
20. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
► Read the full review of Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
⭐ 10/10
Tom Cruise
A doctor wanders through New York over two nights after his wife confesses a fantasy. Almost nobody thinks of it as a Christmas film, and every scene is lit by a Christmas tree. The decorations are everywhere, in every apartment and corridor, and they make the alienation worse instead of better.
It is long, cold and deliberately artificial, with a New York built on a soundstage in England that looks like nowhere. It is on this list as the strongest argument that a Christmas setting can do something other than warmth, and as the last film Kubrick completed.
Why are so many Christmas films sad?
Because the holiday concentrates whatever is already true about a person’s life, and fiction goes where the pressure is.
Christmas creates obligations: to be somewhere, with specific people, performing a specific mood. For anybody whose family is difficult, whose circumstances have changed, or who has nobody to be with, that obligation is the problem instead of the comfort. A writer looking for stakes has them handed over by the calendar.
The other reason is contrast. Loneliness is more visible against a background of organized warmth, and every filmmaker on this list knows it. The Apartment, Carol and Eyes Wide Shut all use decorations as a light source that makes the isolation legible.
What makes a Christmas film last?
Earning the sentiment instead of applying it.
The films that survive spend most of their running time on something difficult and release the warmth at the end, having built the pressure that makes it land. The films that do not survive open warm, stay warm, and give the audience nothing to have felt.
It’s a Wonderful Life is the clearest case. Two hours of a man’s ambitions being systematically denied, then fifteen minutes of release. Reverse those proportions and there is no film. The craft argument is the same one I make about resurrection as a structure: the payoff is worth exactly what the withholding cost.
What is missing from this list?
A great deal, deliberately. Anything where the season is wallpaper is out, which removes most of the annual production.
Several strong films sit just outside. Elf is better than its reputation and did not make the cut. The Richard Curtis ensemble picture is a structural achievement whatever you think of it. The various other Carol adaptations are covered by the two on the list.
For the seasonal material in prose, I have written about the Christmas ghost story tradition and the twelve days of Christmas, and the full account of the first film on this list is at why It’s a Wonderful Life failed on release.