25. Black Christmas (1974)
This slasher classic – the source of that standby horror line: “The call is coming from inside the house!” – shows one victim being stabbed with a glass ornament as carol singers drown out her dying cries. The director, Bob Clark, also made the sweetly folksy A Christmas Story (1983), which represents the flipside of the same chocolate coin.
24. Remember the Night (1939)
Preston Sturges scripted this road-trip lark, which stars Barbara Stanwyck as a shoplifter saved from the prospect of spending Christmas in the clink by a sympathetic district attorney (Fred MacMurray), who puts up her bail then takes her in.
23. Le pupille (2022)
Alice Rohrwacher’s wistful 39-minute wartime comedy about the arrival of a tremendous pudding at an Italian orphans’ boarding school is a proper pick-me-up. It features bored angels, a pretty, moustachioed nun and a spry score by Cleaning Women, whose instruments are fashioned from household items.
22. Female Trouble (1974)
John Waters’ riotous sleaze-fest kicks off with an unruly teen, Dawn Davenport (Divine), going postal after failing to receive the cha-cha heels she wanted from her parents. Stomping on the presents and bringing the tree crashing down on her mother, she screams: “Fuck you both, you awful people! … I hate Christmas!”
21. A Christmas Tale (2008)
The Vuillard clan trade insults and wield grudges during a seasonal get-together that is glorious for us, if not for them. The hostilities between a cancer-stricken mother (Catherine Deneuve) and her resentful, alcoholic son (Mathieu Amalric) are a nasty delight: “Still don’t love me?” “I never did.”
20. Christmas in Connecticut (1945)
Barbara Stanwyck again, this time as a Manhattan food writer who poses in print as a folksy Connecticut mother, then scrambles to make the facade a reality when her editor (Sydney Greenstreet) asks her to host a Christmas dinner for a heroic marine (Dennis Morgan). Subversive screwball complications ensue.
19. Gasman (1998)
There are tears before bedtime in Lynne Ramsay’s heart-crushing short about two children in 1970s Glasgow coming face to face with their secret step-siblings at a rowdy festive shindig. Santa and Slade figure prominently in one of the most vividly dismal Christmases ever put on film.
18. Christmas Holiday (1944)
Stuck in New Orleans and dumped by his fiancee on Christmas Eve, a luckless lieutenant (Dean Harens) meets a torch singer (Deanna Durbin) with her own tale of romantic woe: her sweetheart (an unforgettably creepy Gene Kelly) is in prison for murder. Or so she thinks.
17. Christmas Evil/You Better Watch Out (1980)
Starting from the same premise as I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, this horror-tinged stocking-filler imagines what happened when the child in that song grew up. Employed by the Jolly Dream toy factory, Harry (played by the musician Fiona Apple’s dad, Brandon Maggart) dresses as Santa, keeps a naughty list, donates gifts to the local hospital – and slaughters his co-workers at midnight mass. Dance choreography is by Meryl Streep’s brother and there is a sleigh-ride ending to make Rudolph swoon.
16. Kings and Desperate Men (1981)
Alexis Kanner, the writer-director-star of this ticking-clock thriller about terrorists hijacking a Canadian radio talkshow on Christmas Eve, sued the makers of Die Hard, calling it a “wholesale cinematic Xeroxing” of his film. He lost, and with good reason: the movies, both superb, have nothing in common bar hostages, explosives and Christmas.
15. Die Hard (1988)
Bruce Willis exudes strong post-prandial Christmas dad vibes as John McClane, who dearly wants to take it easy, but gets caught up in thwarting a terrorist group (led by a lip-smacking Alan Rickman) that has hijacked the Los Angeles office block where his wife (Bonnie Bedelia) is partying. Her name? Holly, of course.
14. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Ernst Lubitsch’s epistolary romcom concerns two bickering Budapest giftshop colleagues, played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, who conduct a blissful correspondence, oblivious to each other’s real identity. It was revamped in 1998, with half the charm, as You’ve Got Mail.
13. Brazil (1985)
Terry Gilliam’s Orwellian Christmas nightmare begins with sleigh bells jingling as a child asks her mother how Santa can get in without a chimney. Cue a Swat team bursting through the ceiling to snatch her father, leaving her mother clutching a docket for him as she stands whimpering in the newly demolished front room. Could there be a more meaningful seasonal message than: “Keep the receipt”?
12. Fanny and Alexander (1982)
In writing this early-1900s family saga, rich and dense as a booze-soaked fruit cake, Ingmar Bergman was inspired equally by ETA Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and Dickens, and it was coloured by his relief that a long-running tax evasion case against him had finally collapsed. “I found myself liberated suddenly,” he wrote. Exuberant Christmas celebrations are soon offset by ghosts and grief.
11. The Silent Partner (1978)
As a vicious bank-robber dressed as Santa, Christopher Plummer shows his claws. Viewers are likely to be put off The Sound of Music, fish tanks (as featured in the nastiest scene) and possibly Christmas itself for life. That is a small price to pay for relishing one of the cleverest thrillers since Hitchcock’s heyday. It was scripted by Curtis Hanson, who returned to Christmastime crime in LA Confidential.
10. The Dead (1987)
Taking place on the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January, in 1904 (the day after Twelfth Night), John Huston’s majestic swansong, adapted from James Joyce’s perfect short story, is not set during Christmas itself. But the atmosphere of last-gasp revelry, not to mention the snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling”, as Joyce puts it, more than justifies its place on any tally of Christmassy cinematic wonders.
9. Elf (2003)
Many Christmas films incorporate a hefty dose of the tragic. Not Elf. This effervescent comedy stars Will Ferrell at his most ebullient as Buddy, the human raised as an elf, who leaves Santa’s grotto for the big city to track down his unsuspecting dad (a never-more-gruff James Caan). You would need to be a cotton-headed ninny muggins to resist.
8. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Frank Capra’s conflicted fable, in which George Bailey (James Stewart), a suicidal good-egg, is shown how bad the world would have been without him, was never meant to be a festive treat. Its original release date, in January, was brought forward because another film on the movie company RKO’s schedule wasn’t ready. The Telegraph predicted Capra’s movie would be “gone like a Christmas tree smothered with sweets and crackers”. Instead, it put down roots after falling out of copyright in 1974, enabling TV channels to show it for free.
7. The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
Shane Black has a penchant for setting his films at Christmas (see also: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Lethal Weapon). The most thrilling action movie of the 1990s, scripted by Black, boasts impeccable seasonal credentials: ice-skating, a festive parade and an ingenious climactic stunt involving fairy lights. As the assassin turned housewife, Geena Davis loses her rag brilliantly when her cutie-pie daughter takes a tumble on the ice. “Life is pain,” she snaps. “Get used to it.” Nothing spells Christmas like a parent at the end of her tether.
6. Meet Me in St Louis (1944)
The Christmas episode eclipses and permeates everything else in this year-in-the-life yarn about a Missouri family. As she contemplates her dreaded imminent relocation to New York, Judy Garland sings Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, possibly the most equivocal festive song of all time (“We’ll have to muddle through somehow …”), before her kid sister, Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), starts wailing inconsolably and decapitating the snow-people in the garden.
5. Carol (2015)
There are fraught festivities for Carol (Cate Blanchett) in early-1950s New York as she separates from her husband, fights for custody of their daughter and falls for Therese (Rooney Mara), who serves her at a department store toy counter in an adorable floppy Santa hat. Todd Haynes’s film of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt is a swoon-worthy slow-burner. Were any lovers more perfectly named for a festive romance than Christmas Carol and Christmas Therese?
4. Gremlins (1984)
In Joe Dante’s delirious horror-comedy, written by Chris Columbus (who later directed Home Alone), the very act of gift-giving becomes the catalyst for carnage: the present itself, an exotic fluffy pet, spawns legions of marauding offspring. As if the film’s ambivalence toward the festive season were not clear enough, the rampaging beasties even savage Santa, who gets trussed up in fairy lights, while Phoebe Cates reminisces unforgettably about a traumatic childhood Christmas.
3. The Apartment (1960)
“’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring. Nothin’. No action. Dullsville.” Billy Wilder’s bittersweet comedy skates skilfully on the edge of desolation as it brings together an office clerk (Jack Lemmon) who lets his sleazy superiors borrow his Upper West Side apartment for their assignations and the elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) who is suicidal after being jilted by his boss. Snatching hope from the jaws of despair, it’s a genuine miracle on West 67th St.
2. Tangerine (2015)
“Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” With an opening line like that, nobody could mistake this lively comedy about transgender sex workers for It’s a Wonderful Life. Look closely, though, and you will find the festive spirit thriving in Sean Baker’s whirlwind of attitude, colour and resourcefulness, which was shot on three iPhones with an $8 app. It may be a sun-scorched Christmas on Santa Monica Boulevard, but the dreamy white dots from a bar-room glitterball provide the illusion of snowfall.
1. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
“If you like this,” says Gonzo as Charles Dickens, “you should read the book.” And who wouldn’t like it? This is not only the greatest Christmas film ever made, but also the best Muppet movie and among the most glorious of all Dickens adaptations. Michael Caine plays it fantastically straight as the icicle-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge, which makes his eventual thawing a joyous spectacle. Quotable lines fall like pine needles (“Light the lamp, not the rat!”) and every song by the musical god and Phantom of the Paradise star Paul Williams is a cracker, especially the rousing curtain-raiser introducing Scrooge as “the undisputed master of / The underhanded deed”. God bless us, every Muppet.
