By now, the Christmas break is just around the corner: odds are, you're ready for a well-earned break and want to spend the rest of your time off curled up on the sofa.
Happily, the streamers have you covered, with hundreds of fantastic festive films to watch over the coming weeks.
Given that Disney mastered the art of creating that fuzzy Christmas feeling long ago, they feel like a good place to begin: we have picked just some of the platform's excellent films to get stuck into below. You can sign up to the streaming platform here.
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Although nearly 80 years old, and now a veritable Christmas classic, George Seaton’s comedy-drama about what happens when actual Father Christmas, aka Kris Kringle, steps in for a drunken New York department store Santa Claus, is just about as fresh and funny as the day it was released. Things don’t exactly go swimmingly for Kringle (Edmund Gwenn). After declaring he’s the real Santa, he finds himself in the middle of a court case, with the veracity of his comments and his psychological well-being all under question. But his trial leads to several joyful revelations, which are the stuff of real, heart-warming, sparkling Christmas fare.
Home Alone (1990)
Home Alone is truly one of the Christmas greats, and its sequels – which are also available on Disney+ – are treasures, too. The drama begins when the large and boisterous family of eight-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) go on holiday over the Christmas break and accidentally leave him at home in the mad rush of getting everyone out of the house and onto the plane in time. There's no easy way for them to get back, which means Kevin is stuck at home, alone, for a couple days. Kevin, thrilled with the peace and quiet, is far from scared, but when a pair of crooks decide to burgle the family home, his peaceful staycation takes a slapstick turn.
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
There are dozens of utterly brilliant Christmas films, but The Muppets Christmas Carol is arguably the best of the bunch. It retells one a staple Christmas story, Charles Dickens' 1843 A Christmas Carol; and manages to preserve some of its Victorian severity, its gothic edge, its chilling morals and wintery magic in the process – while also being utterly daft. After all, the touching film has the Muppets dressed up in 19th-century garb, singing and dancing around their version of London, and scattering in every direction at the sign of Michael Caine's Scrooge. What a treat.
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
This 1993 stop-motion animation directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton, tells the story of Jack Skellington, the king of Halloween Town. One fateful day he stumbles across Christmas Town, and subsequently falls in love with the jolly holiday. He rushes home, first trying to create a version of Christmas in Halloween Town before deciding that Halloween Town will put on the wider world’s Christmas instead that year – with extremely chaotic results. A musical classic, the eccentric film is full of romance and magic, all wrapped up in the black velvet bow of Danny Elfman’s beloved soundtrack.
Die Hard (1988)
The jury is still out over whether Die Hard truly counts as a Christmas film, given it has machine guns and kidnap in place of mince pies and reindeer. But, crucially, the fateful Los Angeles office party, which gets disrupted by terrorists, is taking place on Christmas Eve. This becomes a key grievance throughout all the subsequent drama: not only are New York police detective John McClane and his estranged wife being held up by the German villains, but it's the holidays, for God's sake. Bingewatchers, the sequels are also available to stream now.
The Family Stone (2005)
The Family Stone split the critics when it first came out, and it’s easy to see why: the Noughties drama stars Sarah Jessica Parker as an uptight career-driven New Yorker who wears her hair in a bun, constantly clears her throat, and doesn’t exactly ooze warmth. The story follows what happens one Christmas when she is introduced to the equally unfriendly, sometimes rather cruel, New England family of her Manhattan executive boyfriend, Everett (Dermot Mulroney). There's a big cast of stars including Diane Keaton, Luke Wilson, Rachel McAdams and Claire Danes. For some, the film is one fraught family holiday gathering too many. For others it’s great fun: offbeat, at points thought-provoking, a bit soppy, and with interesting leads.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (2005)
Andrew Adamson's 2005 adaptation of C.S. Lewis's classic children's story The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe remains one of the best fantasy films going. And, given it's set in the snowy winter wonderland of Narnia, and has a clear Christian allegory of goodwill at its heart, we absolutely count it as a key Christmas watch. Not only does it have Tilda Swinton doing her best bad guy as the staff wielding, fur-wearing, ferocious White Witch, but Liam Neeson is the voice of lion Aslan, James McAvoy is transformed into faun Mr. Tumnus, Dawn French and Ray Winstone play the voices Mr and Mrs Beaver, and Rupert Everett plays the voice of Mr Fox. A dream!
Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas (2011)
Ice Age, Chris Wedge’s 2002 masterstroke, went down so well it spawned another nine short movies, five feature-length films, an animated shorts series and two television specials. A Mammoth Christmas was one of the latter, and told the story of Christmas unfolding in the icy wonderland. Sid the sloth is causing mayhem as usual, and this time his antics have ruined one of Manny the mammoth’s traditions. Finding himself firmly on the naughty list, Sid heads to the North Pole with some friends to set things right with Father Christmas. Mindless and nonsensical fun, it’s beyond comforting to watch the old crew get up to more japes.
Godmothered (2020)
In Godmothered, Sharon Maguire, the director of Noughties hit Bridget Jones's Diary, turns her hand to telling the story of another woman who is muddling through, this time forty-something single mother Mackenzie (Isla Fisher), who works at a TV station in Boston. While Jones harnesses her friends and a packet of cigarettes to help her face life’s challenges, Mackenzie receives the help of an actual Fairy Godmother, Eleanor, who has just arrived in America from the magical land Motherland. Against the backdrop of Christmas, she promptly gets stuck in, immediately trying to transform Mackenzie’s life into a fairytale. Things, predictably, don’t go according to plan.
