If you’re one to fantasise about having a white Christmas, the more recent The Holdovers is your fix. Set in the New England area in the 1970s, the film takes place in a preppy boarding school where classics teacher Paul Hunhnam (Paul Giamatti) presides over the delinquents and ne’erdowells boarding over the Christmas break. It’s full of powerful performances, with Da’Vine Joy Randolph, as school cook Mary Lamb who spends the Christmas with the motley crew after the death of her only son, going on to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2024.

Is it ethical to recommend Eyes Wide Shut as a Christmas movie? Absolutely! If you were to take it at face value, Stanley Kubrick’s last film is perhaps the quintessential New York Christmas movie. This was also a film that featured then husband-and-wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman at their sexiest. The two play an upper-middle-class couple living in their idyllic Upper West Side apartment, all seems like bliss right? But as far as how eventful Christmas work parties go, the two come to realise their lust for other partners. I’ll leave it there, as the rest gets pretty freaky.

Spencer (2021)

Pablo Larrain’s Spencer is hands down the best Princess Di biopic. Part of his unofficial trilogy about iconic historical women (first was Jackie, about former First Lady Jackie Kennedy, in 2016, and this year with Maria about legendary opera diva Maria Callas), Spencer is a step inside spending a Christmas with the Windors at Sandringham Castle. But it’s not all the TV broadcasts make it out to be. This was a pretty tumultuous time for Diana: the film depicts her fracturing marriage with Prince Charles, as well as scenes of her eating disorder. But considering how it holds up, it’s one of my favourite performances by Kristen Stewart.

Carol (2015)

Christmas shopping in New York City is a sport in itself. Though none romanticises this otherwise nauseating experience than Carol, which stars Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in a bygone era of department store shopping in mid-century America. Though it goes deeper. The two play smitten lovers, each representing a time where women were just carving out roles for themselves in professional spaces. It’s one of cinema’s great queer films; the kind of romance drama that’ll make you curl up by the hearth.

It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)

You might not have gotten around to watching it, but going off resume alone, there’s little disputing that Frank Capra’s all-time classic is the greatest Christmas film ever made. Loosely based on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, it set the template for countless riffs and spoofs on the ‘dead guy sees what the world would be like without him’ formula in the six-decades that would follow.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and dub Klaus the best Christmas film of the century so far. Gorgeously animated and telling a fresh spin on Father Christmas’s origin story that celebrates the character’s Nordic origins rather than leaning on the well-worn Christmas tropes. It’s beautiful, surprisingly gut-wrenching and well worthy of being the only Christmas film this side of the millennium nominated for an Oscar.

Is Love Actually the most culturally-significant Christmas film of the century so far? Probably. One of Richard Curtis’s best rom-coms and the most self-deprecatingly British film made up until the release of Paddington, it now sits firmly alongside Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas as a Christmas essential that’s been done completely to death, yet never truly outstays its welcome.

The claymation geniuses at Aardman are no strangers to telling a Christmas story, having worked on the also-excellent Arthur Christmas and holiday-themed spin-offs of both Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit. Robin Robin, however, is perhaps the most charming of the bunch and at just a smidgen over 30 minutes long, well deserving of a watch if you’re in need of a quick hit of Christmas spirit.

The only bona fide Christmas film to ever win an Oscar (it won three, actually), Miracle on 34th Street might be the oldest entry on this list but undoubtedly set the standard for all Christmas epics that would follow it. Painting the archetypal picture of Christmas in New York we’ve come to adore in the decades since, it’s about as pure a distillation of the holiday spirit as they come, which given the complexity of life in 2023 can’t be a bad thing.

The most refreshingly modern take on the ‘coming home for Christmas’ trope released in some time, Happiest Season combines a stellar cast with a whip smart script about navigating the annual awkwardness of messy young lives crashing headfirst into the conservative confines of the family home.

One of the best slapstick comedies ever made thanks to a pair of iconic turns from Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, Home Alone really needs no introduction. It cemented a young Macauley Culkin’s star among the icons of the decade, launched countless sequels and would-be reboots, and set a gold standard for ‘90s kids that no Christmas movie since has really come close to matching.

It hasn’t aged particularly well, but Bad Santa remains a surprisingly incisive commentary on the unspoken darkness that, for a lot of people, Christmas can often bring about. Combine that with excellent performances from Billy Bob Thornton and the late, great Bernie Mac, and the result is a film you probably won’t watch every year, but provides a welcome hit of acid when the sickly sweet of Christmas becomes a bit cloying.

Elf (2003)

Elf will always live long in the memory of millennials who grew up on a diet of 70 per cent Will Ferrell films, but the decidedly family-friendly Christmas caper still holds up no matter who’s watching. It’s wild to think it’s 20 years old now, though.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Is it a Christmas movie? Is it actually a Halloween movie? That’ll remain up for debate, but Tim Burton’s stop-motion masterpiece is a must-watch pretty much any time in either November or December.