The Best 11 Christmas Films To Watch

AS ANYONE who’s mindlessly flicked through a streaming platform at this time of year will tell you, the Christmas movie industrial complex has never been at such a peak of its powers. The one or two big-budget Hollywood blockbusters we seem to get every yuletide now come alongside so much other miscellaneous Christmas crap, whether it be the dozens of seemingly identical Hallmark movies or Netflix’s annual tradition of throwing a faded teen idol into a low-stakes Christmas caper, that you could genuinely spend the entire rest of the year watching and not get through it all.

All of this, quite naturally, means that spending the precious little downtime you get each holiday season watching something good has never been more important. And while there are plenty of great Chrissy movies out there, we think pretty much anyone can make do with less than 10 absolute classics in firm rotation. From pioneering animation to holiday classics, here’s a quality-over-quantity guide to the holiday flicks that blend that Christmassy feeling with expert filmmaking like no other, and will set you up for a lifetime of cozy viewing. And no, we’re not counting Die Hard.

What are the best Christmas movies?

It’s a Wonderful Life

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.

Klaus

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.

Love Actually

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.

Robin Robin

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.

Miracle on 34th Street

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.

Happiest Season

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.

Home Alone

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.

Bad Santa

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

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

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.