The seasonal film has a reputation problem. It’s 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 aren’t. 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.
Most of what’s sold as Christmas viewing bores me stiff, and I resent how much airtime it eats every December. The films worth keeping are brave enough to be unhappy for most of their running time.
I’d trade a whole season of cozy made-for-television romances for one scene of Henry II and his sons going for each other’s throats at Chinon. Warmth only means something to me when a film has made me wait for it.
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 isn’t 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 doesn’t travel, doesn’t build, doesn’t 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.
I rank it first and I still stop at an eight. The two hours of a man being ground down are the point, and I respect the film for them, but the middle runs long enough that I get restless well before the bridge.
I like it anyway because every loss is so specific. That botched copyright renewal is the luckiest break any film on this list ever got, and it landed on the right film.
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 unpleasant in the early scenes and terrified in the later ones, and the film gives real weight to the middle section about how he became what he is.
It’s 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)
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⭐ 10/10
Jack Lemmon
An office clerk lends his flat to senior executives for their affairs, hoping it’ll get him promoted, and falls for the elevator operator one of them is using. It’s 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 can’t use. The last line is among the most efficient endings in cinema and works 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’s 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 doesn’t work. Alan Rickman’s antagonist is the other reason it’s lasted: courteous, intelligent and never once stupid in service of the plot.
The whole does-it-count argument bores me, because the answer is sitting right there in the plot.
Rickman gives the best villain performance on this page, polite and smart enough that the film never has to dumb him down so Willis can win. That alone puts it above most of the thrillers made since. It’s a ten plus from me, and I’d put it on before any carol-singing special.
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’s a romantic comedy in which the stakes are employment.
6. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
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⭐ 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’s a musical in color 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’s 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 real 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’s 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.
Gremlins is the Christmas movie I’d pick for anybody who thinks the season needs more teeth. The executives who wanted that chimney monologue cut had it exactly backward, and I’m grateful somebody overruled them, because it’s the scene I remember first. My small complaint is that the creature mayhem in the middle goes on a little past the point where it’s still funny.
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’s 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’s 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 large family flies to Paris for Christmas and accidentally leaves one boy behind, the night after he wished they’d 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’s been established.
The neighbor 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’s an actual argument about family underneath the paint cans.
I like Home Alone better than its reputation suggests, and the church scene with the neighbor is the reason.
The paint cans are fun for a while, then the traps start repeating themselves and the cartoon takes over a film that had something better going. That’s why my rating stops at seven and a half. Cut ten minutes of slapstick and I’d rank it higher.
10. Tokyo Godfathers (2003)
► Read the full review of Tokyo Godfathers (2003)
⭐ 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 can’t go back to.
It’s warm without being soft about what its characters have lost, and it’s 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’s the most vicious Christmas film ever made and it’s extremely funny. The dialogue is anachronistic on purpose, closer to a modern stage play than a historical drama. That lets the wounds land without period distance. Anyone who finds seasonal films saccharine should start here, and should be warned that it’s entirely without warmth.
Nothing else on this list gives me as much pleasure.
Every line has a blade in it, and I laugh at how cleanly these people carve each other up while calling it a holiday. I wouldn’t change a scene. Seasonal films almost never dare to be this cruel, and the ones that play it safe look weaker to me every year this one sits beside them.
12. Carol (2015)
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⭐ 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.
Seasonal light shapes the whole film: shop windows, snow through glass, cars at night, the quality of December in a city. It’s a film about what two people can and can’t 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
The school play goes to a boy who finds the season depressing, and he buys the wrong tree. Twenty-five minutes long, and it opens with a child stating plainly that he feels sad at Christmas and doesn’t 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
Three spirits visit a cynical television executive while he produces a live Christmas broadcast. It’s the best modern reworking of the Dickens story because it understands that the man has to be 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’s on the list anyway because the first ninety minutes are sharp, cruel and very funny about the television industry.
I like Scrooged very much for ninety minutes and then the ending disappoints me.
I think that speech to camera is the excruciating kind, a talented man improvising his way into sentiment the rest of the film was too sharp to need. That’s a clear seven. The television satire is good enough that I forgive plenty, and I still wish somebody had cut that speech in half.
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, doesn’t understand it, and decides to run it himself. The premise is much better than the visuals suggest: it’s a film about a competent person doing something badly because he’s mistaken enthusiasm for comprehension.
The stop-motion took three years and it shows in every frame. The Christmas-or-Halloween question has never been settled and doesn’t need to be, and the ambiguity is a large part of why it’s two seasons of shelf life instead of one.
16. Remember the Night (1940)
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⭐ 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, especially in one scene with the woman’s own mother that’s 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)
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⭐ 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. That’s why it’s one of very few Christmas comedies with real stakes.
Not for a family viewing under any circumstances. It’s here because it’s the strongest of the anti-Christmas films and, importantly, it’s not cynical. The redemption is minimal, hard-won and almost entirely unspoken, and the film gives the character nothing he hasn’t paid for.
Bad Santa is crude enough that I’d never recommend it to a lot of viewers, and I still admire it. Most Christmas comedies never work for anything, and this one wins its tiny scrap of redemption the hard way. My reservation is that the gross-out material repeats itself, and a few jokes go for the shock after the shock has stopped working.
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 isn’t entirely benevolent and the marriage he’s 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 a cathedral fundraiser was ever going to fix.
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’s long, cold and deliberately artificial, with a New York built on a soundstage in England that looks like nowhere. It’s on this list as the strongest argument that a Christmas setting can do something other than warmth, and as the last film Kubrick completed.
I think Kubrick’s last film is the smartest use of Christmas decoration ever put on screen, and it makes me uneasy in a way the jolly pictures never manage.
People complain that it’s slow and artificial. Those are the reasons I like it. Every blinking tree in those apartments feels like a lie the characters are telling themselves, and I wouldn’t cut a minute of it.
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?
Building 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 work. The films that don’t 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’s 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 Christmas film is missing from this list?
A great deal, deliberately. Anything where the season is wallpaper is out. That removes most of the annual production. Several strong films sit just outside. Elf is better than its reputation and didn’t make the cut. The Richard Curtis ensemble picture is a structural achievement whatever you think of it. The two on the list cover the other Carol adaptations.
Every film here makes its characters pay before it hands out any comfort, and that’s the only kind of Christmas film I’ve got patience for. A picture that opens warm and stays warm leaves me feeling nothing by the credits. The bridge and the ruined snowmen are what I’ll be watching in December, and I’d put any one of these twenty up against the whole annual crop.
For the seasonal material in prose, I’ve 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.
