A great Christmas film for every year, from 1925 to now

What makes a Christmas film? It’s a question that sparks debate every December. But perhaps a more intriguing one is: when did Christmas movies become a tradition? Today, streaming platforms and cinema schedules overflow with new festive fare, each offering loudly declaring its seasonal spirit. Yet there was a time when less fuss was made about a Christmas setting. A festive backdrop was often incidental rather than something filmmakers squeezed for every ounce of comfort and joy.

The earliest Christmas film was back in 1898: G.A. Smith’s pioneering short Santa Claus used early effects to show Father Christmas doing his rounds. But – despite the now lost first feature version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, entitled The Right to Be Happy (1916), and such New Year’s-focused fables as The Phantom Carriage (1921) and Sylvester (1924) – full-length Yuletide stories were relatively scarce in the silent era. The subgenre only really began to pick up speed in the 1930s, alongside the rise of secular Christmas songs, as the holiday began to evolve into the commercial juggernaut we know today.

Our list traces this journey through its first golden age in the 1940s – when World War II-era nostalgia for family and home gave us such enduring classics as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947) – and its second in the 1980s, when VHS helped turn the likes of Trading Places (1983), Gremlins (1984) and Die Hard (1988) into endlessly rewindable favourites.

By laying out the years like a string of twinkling lights, we follow the festive film through boom times and quieter spells, from Hollywood staples to wilder, more widely sourced gems. Some titles will feel like old friends; others might surprise you. Some will feel as comfortable as a favourite winter jumper; others more like you’re biting down on the sixpence traditionally baked inside a Christmas pudding – family viewing they are not. But these 101 films spanning the last century should provide plenty of fresh ideas for your all-important seasonal watchlist.

– Sam Wigley

• 1920s

• 1930s

• 1940s

• 1950s

• 1960s

• 1970s

• 1980s

• 1990s

• 2000s

• 2010s

• 2020s

Director: Tod Browning

With its snowbound New Year scenes, Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush could have got us started in 1925, but for an altogether weirder choice from 100 years ago look no further than Tod Browning’s perverse crime drama The Unholy Three. It was made during Lon Chaney’s run as Hollywood’s master of disguises, though the only dress-up his criminal ringleader does here is as an elderly woman living with her pretend family – a circus strongman and the violence-prone Tweedledee. Played by Harry Earles, an actor with dwarfism, the latter is an adult disguised as a baby who, in the film’s central Christmas Eve scenes, can be seen smoking a cigar while playing with his toys under the Christmas tree.

– Sam Wigley

Director: James Parrott

With Laurel and Hardy still a twinkle in producer Hal Roach’s eye, the duo’s regular writer H.M. Walker joined forces with director James Parrott on this festive gem starring the latter’s brother, Charley Chase. Determined to buy a watch for  wife, he keeps back $80 in rent from his grasping landlord, who steals Charley’s beard when they clamber on to the roof in Santa suits to surprise their kids. Blissful knockabout nonsense. 

– David Parkinson

Directors: Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks

Dressed as Santa and his reindeer, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and his trusty steed negotiate the narrow chimney at the St Vitus Orphanage, where dozens of mischievous kittens are being read a bedtime story by Oswald’s sweetheart, Ortensia. The artwork and the animation are somewhat primitive. But we’re fortunate to have this monochrome cartoon, as Walt Disney’s first festive offering was long-thought lost before an incomplete print came to light in Norway in 2014. 

– David Parkinson

Director: Jean Renoir

There’s a homemade feel to this take on Hans Christian Andersen’s heartbreaking fable, as producers Jean Renoir and Jean Tedesco painted their own sets in the attic of the Théâtre Vieux Colombier. Twenty-eight year-old Catherine Hessling is affectingly waif-like, as she seeks solace on New Year’s Eve. But it’s the exquisite ingenuity of the visual effects that make this so memorable, and Renoir would return to the theme in ‘The Last Christmas Dinner’ episode of Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (1970).

– David Parkinson

Director: James W. Horne

What could possibly go wrong when Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy try to sell James Finlayson a Christmas tree? No one did vindictive violence like these two funny, gentle men, as neighbour Charlie Hall would be reminded in Tit for Tat (1935). Ever the showman, producer Hal Roach insisted he bought a house from a studio employee to destroy in the finale, only for the crew to get the wrong address. However, 10281 Dunleer Drive is still standing.

– David Parkinson

Director: Edward H. Griffith

Competing New Year’s Eve celebrations epitomise the clashing values in Philip Barry’s satire, as Linda Seton (Ann Harding) had wanted to throw an intimate soirée for sister Julia (Mary Astor) and her unconventional beau, Johnny Case (Robert Ames). But her millionaire father had thrown a lavish engagement party, whose Park Avenue gaudiness sends Johnny reeling to the playroom, where everything changes following a midnight kiss. Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant locked lips in George Cukor’s 1938 screwball remake (see below).

– David Parkinson

Director: Charles F. Reisner

MGM boasted of having more stars than there were in the heavens and this studio promo proves the point. Director Charles Reisner certainly never got to work with another cast containing such big names as Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Lionel Barrymore and Marion Davies. They all chip in to help Jackie Cooper organise a festive celebration for his football buddies. Shortly afterwards, the nine year-old would become Oscar’s youngest acting nominee for Skippy (1931).

– David Parkinson

Director: Wilfred Jackson

A musical Disney short from their Silly Symphony series, Santa’s Workshop depicts the busy preparations by Santa and his factory of elves on Christmas Eve. Lists are consulted, toys are put together (be warned: some featuring racist caricatures) and the reindeers are brushed down before Santa heads off on his sleigh into the Christmas night. 

– Sam Wigley

Director: Michael Curtiz

Following on where director Michael Curtiz and stars Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray had left off with Doctor X (1932), the final feature filmed in two-strip Technicolor takes place in New Year New York following a coda set 12 years earlier in London. An unpublished Charles S. Belden short story afforded Glenda Farrell the chance to shine as the intrepid reporter who sets out to impress her snarky editor by discovering why corpses keep disappearing from the city morgue. 

– David Parkinson

Director: W.S. Van Dyke

Arriving in New York in this classic detective comedy, Nick (William Powell) and Nora Charles (Myrna Loy) host a raucously chic Christmas Eve cocktail party, with mugs on either side of the law mingling to belt out ‘O Christmas Tree’. But the morning-after scene is even better, as Nora looks on wryly while wrapped in a sweltering fur coat, as Nick flops on the sofa and pops balloons on the tree with his new BB gun. No wonder Asta (the dog) can’t bear to look!

– David Parkinson

Director: Henry Edwards

There have been over 400 different versions of Charles Dickens’s beloved seasonal story since Daniel Smith starred in Walter R. Booth’s short film Scrooge; or, Marley’s Ghost (1901). Few have played the old miser more than Seymour Hicks, however, who became the first Ebenezer Scrooge in a sound feature following over 2,000 stage appearances and a 1913 silent. Intriguingly, veteran director Henry Edwards borrowed expressionist lighting designs, but largely kept the spirits off screen.

– David Parkinson

Director: Richard Boleslawski

There have been several screen adaptations of Peter B. Kyne’s 1910 Saturday Evening Post story ‘Bronco Billy and the Baby’ – see two more below. Richard Boleslawski’s MGM reading is famously sentimental. Yet those who remember the story of three outlaws rescuing a helpless infant in the desert outside New Jerusalem for its schmaltz should listen again for the dead-hearted cruelty with which Bob Sangster (Chester Morris) scowls, “There ain’t no Santa Claus”, after gunning down a bank manager dressed as Father Christmas in cold blood.

– David Parkinson

Director: Leo McCarey

Jean Renoir believed director Leo McCarey understood people better than anyone in Hollywood, while Orson Welles insisted his Depression-era drama was so sad it would make a stone cry. Inspired by Josephine Lawrence’s novel The Years Are So Long, it opens with a Christmas scene-setter, in which Barkley (Victor Moore) and Lucy Cooper (Beulah Bondi) inform four of their five adult children that they are about to lose their home because the unemployed Barkley can’t keep up the payments. 

– David Parkinson

Director: George Cukor

Just four months after the release of Bringing Up Baby, the Grant-Hepburn double act was back in a gentler but no less essential comedy, this time set during preparations for a New Year’s party. Based on a Philip Barry play which had already been made into the 1930 film version, Holiday stars Grant as Johnny Case, a self-made man who unknowingly enters into Park Avenue high society after proposing to a woman he met on vacation. It’s not long before his fiancée’s elder sister, Linda (Hepburn), has also fallen for his down-to-earth charms, a welcome tonic in this starchy world. For all its glittering surfaces, George Cukor’s film is a warning against what Linda calls “reverence for riches”, but one delivered with wit and humanity. 

– Sam Wigley

Director: Mitchell Leisen

Squeezing into this slot by virtue of having its world premiere in Salt Lake City on New Year’s Eve 1939, Mitchell Leisen’s romantic drama was the opening shot of the decade when Christmas movies really started to become established as a genre unto themselves. Scripted by the great Preston Sturges, it throws together two unlikely companions for a Christmas of wintry road trips and family visits: Barbara Stanwyck as a shoplifter and Fred MacMurray as the assistant district attorney who is prosecuting her/falling in love with her.

– Sam Wigley

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

A mischievous and disarming James Stewart – devastatingly young and handsome, all gangly limbs and cheeky grin – lights up the screen as disenchanted store clerk Alfred Kralik in Ernst Lubitsch’s much-loved festive comedy-of-errors. In his third collaboration with Margaret Sullavan, the lived-in chemistry shared between the two protagonists crackles with believability, with that classic ‘Lubitsch touch’ enveloping the pair with a charming warmth and intimacy. 

– Steph Green, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 1940s

Director: Frank Capra

The power of the press and the susceptibility of the public come under scrutiny in Frank Capra’s classic underdog saga. Christmas Eve proves pivotal, as washed-up baseball pitcher John Willoughby (Gary Cooper) threatens to commit suicide after tiring of the social protest stunt devised by columnist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) that strikes a chord with a beleaguered nation needing a champion. 

– David Parkinson, writing in 50 great Christmas films currently streaming

Director: Mark Sandrich

There’s no escaping Holiday Inn’s durability, even if for little else than gifting the season Bing Crosby at the piano, crooning ‘White Christmas’ a dozen years before the song spawned an eponymously titled picture of its own. Irving Berlin, responsible for both story and the film’s numbers, presumably saw commercial potential in a film that celebrated all the holidays of the year, hoping it’d be the go-to 100 minutes every couple of months. It wasn’t to be, but its modest charms filling TV schedules whenever December rolls around is surely no poor consolation eight decades later. 

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas musicals

Director: Claude Autant-Lara

Christmas is used to contrast attitudes above and below stairs in this riveting fin-de-siècle melodrama, which says as much about the Nazi occupation of France as it does about class and convention. Scripted by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost from a Michel Davet novel, Claude Autant-Lara’s seething saga centres on heiress Douce Bonafé (Odette Joyeux), who seeks to elope with the handsome servant who is romancing her governess, who in turn has designs on her charge’s father.

– David Parkinson

Director: Vincente Minnelli

A large and loving family living in middle-class comfort in 1903 must navigate low-stakes obstacles in Meet Me in St. Louis, Vincente Minelli’s Technicolor musical, which gave Judy Garland her first ‘adult’ role as girl-next-door Esther Smith. As she wistfully warbles a skin-tingling rendition of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ by a snowy windowsill, the lyrics are pathos-laden and pertinent considering the ongoing war: “Someday soon, we all will be together, if the fates allow / Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”

– Steph Green, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 1940s

Director: Peter Godfrey

Adept at playing both femme fatales and comediennes, Barbara Stanwyck is on peak form in this screwball comedy. Her fraudulent character, Elizabeth Lane, pretends she’s a culinary-minded housewife for her magazine column when in fact she’s a rather shallow ‘modern woman’ whose main ambition in life is to look fabulous and own a mink coat. Trying to keep up the pretence when her editor sends a dashing sailor to her non-existent farmhouse for the holidays, she’ll go to any length necessary to keep her job and the ruse. As a farce it captures the frenzy of the festive season: the manic expectation to have fun and be perfect, when a pot is always perilously threatening to bubble over. 

– Steph Green, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 1940s

Director: Frank Capra

What else needs to be said about Frank Capra’s hopeful, heartstring-tugging movie, a lovingly rewatched phenomenon that acts as collective kintsugi each year? About James Stewart’s sensitive performance of a man on the brink of giving up, only to be pieced back together by the love and generosity of his community? Some films are great, but others are genuinely life-affirming: this is the epitome, and only the most churlish grinch could possibly disagree.

– Steph Green, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 1940s

Director: George Seaton

Writer Valentine Davies dreamt up the idea for this enduring Christmas classic while standing in a holiday season queue and wondering what Santa would make of such commercialisation. The resulting film, featuring an engaging white-bearded old man (Edmund Gwenn) working in Macy’s while claiming to be the real Kris Kringle – a claim later defended in court – would go on to win three Academy Awards, including Best Original Story for Davies and Best Supporting for Gwenn.

- David Morrison, writing in 10 great department store films

Director: John Ford

While the oppressive Death Valley desert may not initially invoke festive cheer, John Ford’s nativity-inspired western is a special addition to the Christmas film canon. Based on the same short story as the 1936 film Three Godfathers, the touching oater sees three cattle thieves (played by John Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz and Harry Carey Jr) become unexpected custodians of an orphaned infant, whom they take to be a symbol of the infant Jesus. Stumbling towards the town of New Jerusalem as Christmas looms, they must also try to stave off dehydration and evade the chase of Sheriff Buck Sweet (Ward Bond).

– Steph Green, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 1940s

Director: Don Hartman

Starring Robert Mitchum in one of his rare sweet roles (which he reportedly took to fix his image after a cannabis drugs bust), Holiday Affair sees two men fighting for the romantic affections of a fresh-faced Janet Leigh. She plays Connie, a single mother widowed after her husband’s death during the war, who supports herself working as a competitive shopper. Unluckily for her, store clerk Steve Mason (Mitchum) spots her “corporate espionage” and threatens to warn every store in town about her. After this rocky start, the pair soon realise they get on and find themselves repeatedly drawn to one another in the days leading up to Christmas, much to the chagrin of Connie’s fiancé.

– Steph Green, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 1940s

Director: Akira Kurosawa

In this early Akira Kurosawa title, made immediately before his international breakthrough with the same year’s Rashomon, a conflicted lawyer, Hiruta (Takashi Shimura), is jolted out of defeated futility by his pure-hearted daughter’s faith and eventual disappointment in him. The turning point arrives on Christmas Day as – to the sound of ’Jingle Bells’ on the soundtrack – Toshiro Mifune’s rebel artist Ichiro delivers a Christmas tree by motorcycle. In Kurosawa’s Christmas tale, like Ebenezer Scrooge or the George Bailey character in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Hiruta is saved by the goodness of those around him and the spirit of the festive season. 

– Hayley Scanlon, writing in When Kurosawa made a Christmas film

Director: Brian Desmond Hurst

Of the various excellent screen manifestations of Charles Dickens’s story about a miser who becomes the embodiment of Christmas spirit after three spectral visitations, it’s Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1951 version that has become the classic, and that’s largely due to the performance of Alistair Sim, whose bereftness at the loss of his beloved sister sets him on the path to callous avarice. The double-exposed hauntings may not inspire dread, although the influence of expressionism is evident in C.M. Pennington-Richards’ cinematography. 

– David Parkinson, writing in 10 great British Christmas films

Director: George More O’Ferrall

In this Chekhovian chamber drama, based on a 1950 West End hit by playwright Wynyard Browne, the children of a Norfolk parson gather at a snowy vicarage for Christmas. Fashionista Margaret (Margaret Leighton) and soldier Michael (Denholm Elliott) are reluctant visitors to Wyndenham, as they have lost their faith and grown apart from sister Jenny (Celia Johnson), who has rejected the marriage proposal of a local engineer (John Gregson) to care for their father. Despite the cut-glass accents of a cast who unusually rehearsed on the sets before shooting in sequence, there’s something enduringly relevant about such themes as the breakdown of communication, the anguish of alienation, the demise of deference, and the vagaries of family life.

– David Parkinson, writing in 10 great British Christmas films

Director: Billy Wilder

With this hard-bitten reworking of a Broadway play, Billy Wilder follows Ace in the Hole (1951) with a marginally less scathing depiction of human nature. It’s December 1944 in a German prisoner-of-war camp and William Holden’s cynical J.J. Sefton is accused by his fellow US soldiers of being an informant. Stuffed with yuletide beatings and a Christmas Day execution, Stalag 17 offers little in the way of peace on earth or goodwill toward men, but it’s a gripping, darkly comedic treat regardless.

– Lou Thomas

Director: John Guillermin

There’s little comfort or joy in this sophisticated soap opera from emerging director John Guillermin. He keeps his camera moving to convey the bustle at department store Bunting and Hobbs, while also deftly shifting tone to follow the fortunes of five women who work on various counters. The storyline centring on Yvonne (Josephine Griffin) was considered scandalous for its time, as she discovers she’s pregnant by a man from a wealthy family. Even more shockingly, would-be film star Suzy (Vera Day) is assaulted by a chauffeur posing as a director.

- David Morrison, writing in 10 great department store films

Director: Wendy Toye

Like a wintry biscuit-tin illustration come to life, this 23-minute riff on the old Christmas song ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’ ranks among the UK’s most delightful contributions to the seasonal watchpile. Set in a snowy corner of Edwardian England, it imagines the sheer clutter and chaos that would ensue should a ‘true love’ actually gift his darling ‘12 drummers drumming, 11 pipers piping, 10 lords a-leaping, 9 ladies dancing…’ etc etc. At a time when women directors were all but unknown in the UK, Wendy Toye gravitated towards cinema from a career in ballet, and the snow-globe world of this Oscar-nominated short has more in common with Powell and Pressburger’s stylised ballet films than with the prevailing realist trends in British cinema then and now.

– Sam Wigley, writing in 10 great European Christmas films

Director: Lotte Reiniger

Lotte Reiniger is perhaps most famous for creating the earliest surviving animated feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). Her immediately recognisable animation style uses delicate silhouettes to conjure the storybook images of the fables she adapted. Her 1956 film The Star of Bethlehem retells the nativity story with her own unique blend of gothic-infused fairytale elements. The most dramatic sequence is the attack by the devils, a non-Biblical subplot where the influence of European fairytales is clearly evident.

– James White, writing in Lotte Reiniger and The Star of Bethlehem

Director: Leo McCarey

Hankies ready for Leo McCarey’s remake of his own 1939 weepie Love Affair, which (spoiler alert) reaches its climax on Christmas Eve, as playboy-turned-painter Nickie Ferrante (Cary Grant) discovers why piano teacher Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr) failed to make their rendezvous atop the Empire State Building after they had promised to meet six months after romancing aboard a transatlantic liner.

– David Parkinson, writing in 50 great Christmas films currently streaming (2021 edition)

Director: Richard Quine

In the same year their pairing generated the centrifugal force at the core of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak also appeared together in this much lighter and more sprightly proposition – a gorgeous black-magic romance set on Christmas Eve. Novak plays the owner of a Greenwich Village art shop who also happens to be a witch. Stewart is the neighbour she places a love spell on. 

– Sam Wigley, writing in 50 great Christmas films currently streaming 

Directors: John Halas and Joy Batchelor

Coming between Tom and Jerry in Kitty Foiled (1948) and Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (1993), this Halas and Batchelor cartoon borrows the silent serial gambit of a villain tying a victim to a railtrack. It’s quite a departure from the opening lines of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’, but harum-scarum fun all the same. 

– David Parkinson, writing in 50 great Christmas films currently streaming 

Director: Billy Wilder

Seven years after Stalag 17, Billy Wilder was back with another Christmas tale with a bitter edge. Here the season of good cheer provides the backdrop for a tale in which loneliness and romantic despair provide the bass notes, as Jack Lemmon’s corporate schlub C.C. Baxter – in an effort to curry his favour – loans his apartment out to his boss for the latter’s extra-marital affairs. Things get complicated when Baxter falls for one of the women, elevator girl Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), and their mutual connection offers the flame that warms up this bleak New York story, leading to one of cinema’s great last lines.

– Sam Wigley

Director: Allen Baron

This lean, lonely noir thriller follows a hitman as he carries out his methodical work on Christmas Day. At only 77 minutes long, it hustles along after Allen Baron (both director and star) as he walks a solitary trek down Fifth Avenue. The brightly lit department store displays and colourful lights are drowned out by the rough monochrome of the film’s black and white – not to mention the protagonist’s abject dislike of the city at large. Lionel Stander’s gnarled baritone provides the voiceover here, and it’s certainly memorable: nihilistic, punch-to-the-gut prose that’s exquisitely hardboiled. Contrasted with the twinkling jubilation of a Manhattan Christmas, the protagonist walks the streets with a sense of existential dread. Regardless of the holidays, there’s a job to be done. 

– Christina Newland, writing in 10 great indie Christmas films

Director: Abe Levitow

Producing American television’s first animated Christmas special was something of a last hurrah for United Productions of America. The studio had been formed by mutinous Disney artists and had earned 15 Oscar nominations, with wins for When Magoo Flew (1954) and Magoo’s Puddle Jumper (1956). Voiced by Jim Backus, the myopic bumbler plays Ebenezer Scrooge in a stage production of the Dickens story that alters the spectral chronology. The songs are pure corn, but this hits the sweet spot.

– David Parkinson

Director: John Ford

Christmas has come to the French Polynesian island of Haleakaloha in this breezy late-period wonder from director John Ford. But first, another annual tradition: a punch-up between John Wayne’s bar owner and his sailor pal, Lee Marvin. The two meet every year on their shared birthday to exchange blows; the reason lost to time and the bottle. In Donovan’s Reef, plot (concerning a complicated inheritance) plays second fiddle to island charms: salty air and saltier words; a festive fir strapped to the back of a jeep; a nativity play that finds communion – and community – in the cultural melting pot.

– Matthew Thrift

Director: Jacques Demy

‘Décembre 1963’, reads the title card 10 minutes before the end of Jacques Demy’s musical masterpiece. Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) and Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) have long since parted, following his draft into the Algerian war. It’s Christmas Eve when she pulls into the gas station he now runs with his wife, Madeleine (Ellen Farner). Madeleine and the couple’s young son François have gone to see the Christmas displays, as Guy invites his former lover in, while their daughter, Françoise – conceived before his draft – sits in the car. The couple can barely look at each other, their halting discomfort only interrupted by a garage attendant. “Are you doing well?” she finally asks, before retreating to her car – “Yes, very well” – and driving away. Madeleine and the young boy return, as the love theme from Michel Legrand’s score swells to choral and orchestral ecstasy, and Demy takes to the skies with a crane shot for the ages. Tears rain. 

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas musicals

Director: Bill Melendez

Are there a more cockle-warming, existentially profound 25 minutes in all of TV than the Charlie Brown Christmas special? Christmas is approaching, and Charlie Brown is feeling depressed. “I know I’m supposed to be feeling happy, but I’m not.” Everyone’s getting in on the Christmas act, even Snoopy (“My own dog, gone commercial, I can’t believe it”), but Charlie Brown just can’t seem to get with the programme, barely mustering enough enthusiasm to direct the Christmas play. When it’s decided that only a Christmas tree can save the show, Charlie Brown returns with a scrawny wretch of a shrub, and all hell breaks loose. It falls to Linus to spell out the true meaning of Christmas, something Charlie Brown can finally take to heart.

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas comedies

Director: Jean Eustache

Jean Eustache’s autobiographical assault on misplaced nostalgia was filmed on spare stock from Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin (1966). Slinking round Narbonne ogling girls, shoplifting and cheating at bingo, Daniel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) epitomises the Marx and Coca-Cola generation, as he finds work as a shop Santa in order to afford the duffle coat he hopes will wow the in-crowd at a trendy café. Note the nouvelle vague nod, as he gazes at a poster for The 400 Blows (1959).

– David Parkinson

Director: Tom Gries

Having bonded with stranded traveller Joan Hackett’s young son over choosing a tree, ageing Flat Iron ranch line-rider Charlton Heston seems set for a cosy cabin Christmas in this late-1960s western. But vengeful preacher Donald Pleasence and his thuggish sons burst in on them. The scene in which Heston explains why he can’t sing carols will have the stiffest lips trembling.

– David Parkinson

Director: Anthony Harvey

Henry II didn’t actually release estranged queen Eleanor of Aquitaine from convent exile to spend Christmas at Chinon in 1183. But James Goldman packs plenty of historical fact into this crackling adaptation of his stage play, as the couple’s ambitious sons compete to succeed their father in a Plantagenet variation on Game of Thrones. Peter O’Toole and the Oscar-winning Katharine Hepburn exchange zingers with a withering savagery that Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close couldn’t quite replicate in a 2003 tele-remake. 

– David Parkinson

Director: Éric Rohmer

Falling snow sets a moral trap in Éric Rohmer’s classic French New Wave drama. Jean-Louis Trintignant’s self-serious engineer, Jean-Louis, is new in Clermont Ferrand when he encounters a blonde woman in church and determines to marry her. But his resolve is tested when, over the Christmas holidays, he gets snowed in for the night at a friend of a friend’s flat. This is the charismatic and opinionated Maud (Françoise Fabian), with whom Jean-Louis spends a long Christmas Eve night filled with temptation and discussion.

- Sam Wigley, writing in 10 great films set in the winter

Director: Ronald Neame

In this umpteenth stab at the nightcapped miser’s tale, the influence of Carol Reed’s Oscar-winning Dickens musical Oliver! (1968) is on full display in the late number ‘Thank You Very Much,’ a full-on Cockney knees up down the streets of Shepperton’s immense soundstages. The rest of the numbers by Leslie Bricusse do little to make up for his work on the 1967 catastrophe Doctor Dolittle, but there’s ample recompense in the nasally sniping lead performance by Albert Finney and a scene-stealing Alec Guinness as the clog-popped Jacob Marley. The latter’s attempt to sing – something between a growl and a cough – is worth the price of admission alone. 

- Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas musicals

Director: Claude Jutra

In this pantheon-level Canadian film, director Claude Jutra might depict the bleakest Christmas Eve committed to celluloid. Set in an impoverished mining town of the 1940s, the story revolves around an old-fashioned dry goods shop where a young boy, Benoit, works for his curmudgeonly old uncle. In spite of the snowy, wind-blown setting and the nativity scene in the storefront window, things couldn’t be any less cheerful. To make ends meet, the boy and his uncle work as undertakers on the side, coming face to face with death on a regular basis. When the two set off on a night-long Christmas Eve odyssey to retrieve a corpse and find themselves in a ‘situation’, adolescent Benoit faces a troubling, revelatory conversation with his uncle. 

– Christina Newland, writing in 10 great indie Christmas films

Director: Freddie Francis

It’s the opening section of the third (and best) of Freddie Francis’s anthology films for Amicus that concerns us here. It’s Christmas Eve, and Joan Collins has just embedded a fire iron in her husband’s head as her daughter sleeps upstairs. A radio announcement that there’s an escaped lunatic in the area dressed as Santa Claus could provide her with the perfect alibi, as long as he doesn’t make it into the house before the police arrive. The film that started the whole psycho-Santa subgenre, it may not be the most iconic example (the notorious marketing campaign alone for 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night gives that film that honour), but with a lean 12-minute running time it’s easily the most effective. 

- Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas horror films

Director: Václav Vorlíček

Filmed in Bohemia amid carpets of snow, this much-loved classic from Czechoslovakia/East Germany is a fixture in the Christmas TV schedules across much of central and eastern Europe. It’s a live-action treatment of the Cinderella fairytale in which Cinderella herself proves unusually feisty and resilient – at least for viewers only familiar with the winsome Disney version. The plot pivots on the three magical nuts gifted our heroine by an enchanted owl called Rosie. In turn, the nuts gift her the garments she needs to escape the drudgery of life with her cruel stepmother and to beguile the handsome prince. Václav Vorlíček’s film invites us into its storybook realm with the aid of a memorably romantic theme song by Czech singing star Karel Gott. 

- Sam Wigley, writing in 10 great European Christmas films

Director: Bob Clark

Black Christmas belongs to the early cycle of 1970s slasher films, with the fixtures we’ve now come to expect: sorority girls being stalked, a sinister voice at the end of the phone, and a killer who’s secretly been inside the house all along. Opening with unnerving strains of ‘Silent Night’, the film begins with the sorority’s annual Christmas party, when the killer calls up and makes chilling, aggressive sexual comments to the girls. Gore and horror films set in conjunction with December festivities are not too uncommon, but Clark’s film really sets the tone – not just for the subversive impulses of the holiday horror, but for the architecture of the entire slasher flick.

– Christina Newland, writing in 10 great indie Christmas films

Director: Sydney Pollack

Sydney Pollack’s terrific, post-Watergate conspiracy thriller hardly telegraphs its Christmas credentials. In fact, our only real awareness of the holiday period comes from snatches of background music heard on radios and TVs. It makes for an effective means of heightening Robert Redford’s sense of alienation, of dislocating him from the quotidian following the opening assault that sees his co-workers gunned down. “I’m not a field agent, I just read books!” Redford’s CIA librarian protests to his point-man. He is forced to go on the run with a hostage (Faye Dunaway) in tow and a hitman (Max von Sydow) on his tail, the film’s paranoid mechanics fuelled by the notion that trust is but a vice.

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas thrillers

Director: Alan Rudolph

“I can’t stand Christmas here,” says Sally Kellerman’s unhappily married real estate agent. “It’s so feeble.” And it’s true that the Los Angeles of Alan Rudolph’s multi-character drama isn’t the most festive of settings, though we do get Geraldine Chaplin swaddled in winter furs and Harvey Keitel (playing her husband) wearing a Father Christmas beard. But it turns out the City of Angels is pretty good at a blue Christmas, and the network narrative of romantic interconnections – revolving around Keith Carradine’s visiting singer-songwriter – comes steeped in feelings of longing and despair that many will recognise as recurring symptoms of another year drawing to a close. It’s produced by Robert Altman, and plays like the melancholy B-side to Altman’s own Nashville (1975).

– Sam Wigley 

Director: Stephen Frears

Birmingham housewife Carmen Munro is dreaming of a Christmas like the ones she used to know. But her idle husband, womanising brother and pregnant daughter have other ideas. There’s nothing like The Rise and Fall of Nellie Brown (1964) on the telly in this bittersweet dramedy and it says much that it has virtually disappeared since debuting in the Second City Firsts strand, despite being scripted by Michael Abbensetts, whose Empire Road (1978 to 1979) was the first TV drama series by a Black British writer. 

– David Parkinson

Director: Daryl Duke

In this little-seen Canadian picture from 1978, written by Curtis Hanson, bank teller and hobbying aquarist Elliott Gould clocks that a mall Santa Claus is planning to hold up his branch. Sensing an opportunity, he stashes a wad of the day’s take, claiming it went to the stick-up artist he fobbed-off with small change. He doesn’t reckon on this erstwhile Father Christmas – a sadistic psychopath chillingly played by a mascara’d Christopher Plummer – seeing news of the size of the take on TV and waging a campaign of revenge. Director Daryl Duke ratchets tension from a simmer to a rolling boil en route to the violent one-two punch of a climax that foreshadows Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). 

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas thrillers

Director: Terry Jones

It starts with an auspiciously hilarious pre-credit scene in which the three wise men of the nativity story accidentally visit the Bethlehem stable next door to the one where baby Jesus is born. It ends with one of cinema’s greatest comedy songs. In between, silly and surreal Oxbridge comedy troupe Monty Python deliver a religious satire for the ages – accusations of blasphemy be damned.

– Lou Thomas

Director: Lewis Jackson

The sole credit for director Lewis Jackson, this terrifically strange one-off predated Silent Night, Deadly Night’s notion that a traumatic childhood encounter with Santa Claus might trigger an unhealthy desire to dress up as the Coca-Cola Company’s benevolent mascot and slaughter those on the naughty list. Yet there’s more to Christmas Evil than might initially be expected, not least in thoughtful visuals which belie its low-budget. If its nutjob subjectivity initially feels more than a little creepy, it offers enough psychological complexity to warrant its subversive perspective on both character and themes, going some way to earning its Frankenstein-riffing finale and brilliantly surreal final shot.

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas horror films

Director: Claude Miller

A lavish New Year’s Eve bash at police headquarters provides the backdrop for Claude Miller’s tense adaptation of John Wainwright’s 1979 novel Brainwash. Bitter at being disinvited, small-town attorney Jérôme Martinaud (Michel Serrault) toys with world-weary inspector Antoine Galien (Lino Ventura) over the rape and murder of two young girls. A festive family flashback and two tired Christmas trees also feature before the suspect’s vindictive spouse (Romy Schneider, in her penultimate performance) offers damning evidence as midnight strikes.  

– David Parkinson

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman’s epic family drama begins with the lavish Christmas Eve celebrations of the Ekdahl family in turn-of-the-20th-century Sweden. With the streets outside piled high with snow, we see table places being set and presents put under the tree. The extended family arrives, wine is poured and a feast laid before them. Drawing on the director’s own memories of childhood, Fanny and Alexander finds the usually astringent Swedish master in a rare nostalgic spirit. The children’s-eye-view of festive rituals such as bedtime magic lantern shows and a torchlit troika ride through the snow make the opening section of Bergman’s magnum opus one of the most enchanting depictions of Christmas on film. 

- Sam Wigley, writing in 10 great European Christmas films

Director: John Landis

“We took a perfectly useless psychopath like Valentine and turned him into a successful executive, and during the same time we turned an honest, hardworking man into a violently deranged, would-be killer.” So goes the set-up as spelled out by Randolph Duke (Ralph Bellamy) to his brother Mortimer (Don Ameche), the two tycoons settling a bet on the roles of nature or nurture in forging a successful businessman. The patsies in question are Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) and Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd); one a panhandling hustler, the other the company golden boy. What Christmas would be complete without the sight of Aykroyd as a drunken Santa, growling into the night? 

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas comedies

Director: Joe Dante

With the manic abandon of a Chuck Jones cartoon, Gremlins unleashes a subversive maelstrom of mischief on its Capra-esque setting, perfectly balancing the cosy values of screenwriter Chris Columbus and producer Steven Spielberg with the proclivities of its director Joe Dante for sharp political and social satire. As much a skewering of small-town fears and paranoia (notably of immigration) as it is of seasonal goodwill, it’s Dante’s anarchic deconstruction of cultural as well as social values that makes Gremlins such a riotous blast. There’s a Cronenberg vibe to Chris Walas’s extraordinary puppetry and effects work, which strikes just the right balance between laughs and scares.

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas horror films

Director: Rob Reiner

Rob Reiner’s overlooked early-career gem comes across like a dry run for When Harry Met Sally… (1989). Much of the appeal comes from watching the sparks fly from its fractious pairing of Daphne Zuniga’s virginal square, Alison, and John Cusack’s cynical smartass and wannabe womaniser, Walter. The two are thrust together by a rideshare board and embark on a road trip, chock full of misadventures, from New England to California during their university Christmas break. In an age when American teen comedies came to be defined by the success of Porky’s (1982), The Sure Thing triumphs from its winning formula of being sassy yet never bawdy and sentimental while never mawkish.

– Jasper Sharp, writing in Rob Reiner: 5 essential films

Director: Konstantin Lopushansky

Has there ever been a more sombre Christmas film than Konstantin Lopushansky’s debut feature, which is set in a small town in Western Europe in the aftermath of an accidental nuclear conflagration? Yet there’s something intensely hopeful about the scene in which Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Larsen (Rolan Bykov) fashions a Christmas tree out of sticks and candles and coaxes the children sheltering in a condemned orphanage to make some decorations to adorn it. 

– David Parkinson

Director: John Huston

Fade in on a snow-covered street in Dublin in 1904. The street lamps are lit and the silhouettes of dancers can be seen in the glow of the upstairs windows of one of the townhouses. Horse-drawn carriages bring guests to the annual Epiphany gathering hosted by the Morkan sisters and their niece – a time for merry-making, conviviality and, this year, the return of buried memories. For his final gift to the medium, an ailing John Huston directed this immaculate adaptation of James Joyce’s short story. Epiphany – the celebration of the magi visiting baby Jesus – may technically be the day after the twelfth night of Christmas, but Huston’s film makes perfect seasonal viewing for its glowing, gaslit interiors; its warm feeling for mirth and melancholy. The final sequence is a moving coda for Huston’s career, seeing Gabriel (Donal McCann) musing on “the living and the dead” as snow falls over Ireland.

- Sam Wigley, writing in 10 great European Christmas films

Director: John McTiernan

A brutal attack on a Los Angeles corporate skyscraper by thieves posing as terrorists might make for unlikely Christmas viewing but surely no list of best Christmas films would be complete without John McTiernan’s action classic Die Hard? Bruce Willis’s resourceful hero John McClane tangles with creepy Euro-terrorist Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his gang on Christmas Eve and soon tinsel, trees, eggnog and baubles are being caught up in the not inconsiderable crossfire. Not your average festive film then (though beneath the mayhem there’s a simple and appropriately festive tale of a man just trying to get home to his family for the big day), but as an antidote to the hours of feel-good TV movie schmaltz routinely served up at this time of year it just can’t be beaten. 

– Kevin Lyons, writing in 10 great Christmas films

Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski

Having gone through the festive motions with his wife and children, cabby Daniel Olbrychski comes to appreciate what he has after spending Christmas Eve helping lonely old flame Maria Pakulnis search for her missing husband in the more desolate parts of Warsaw. There are two commandments for the price of one in this third part of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s acclaimed series, as the director reflects upon adultery and respecting the Sabbath, while musing upon compassion, contrition and commitment in stressing the sanctity of time.

– David Parkinson

Director: Whit Stillman

Whit Stillman’s debut offers a rarified take on Christmas with a film set among a world of debutantes and strivers in droll, chatty New York high society. Played by a largely unknown cast, the callow kids of Metropolitan do a lot of talking – about literature, romantic entanglements and, vitally, about their dying old-world monied class. Rife with romantic intrigue and youthful spats, the film takes place over the course of winter break on the Upper West Side, where the cast gathers near a tastefully festooned Christmas tree. There’s an idealistic, F. Scott Fitzgerald-style youth in the lead male role (Edward Clements), and he soon falls into step with the rhythms of ‘deb’ society. Dressed to the nines in elegant tuxedos and au courant satin gowns, the twentysomethings bicker and party in an NYC that – now and then – opens itself wide to the ‘urban haute bourgeoisie’.

– Christina Newland, writing in 10 great indie Christmas films

Director: Dave Unwin

There’s no place like home in this beloved Raymond Briggs adaptation about a grumpy British Father Christmas who recounts a bloomin’ calamitous holiday across various locations. Late comedian Mel Smith lends his gruff vocals to the colourful hand-drawn animation as Santa gets sunburnt in Las Vegas and stomach pains in France. Since the 1990s this short has become a cosy staple of the Christmas season and makes a wonderful double bill with The Snowman. Best enjoyed with a nice brew. 

– Katherine McLaughlin

Director: Brian Henson

Anyone expecting an irreverent, let alone anarchic, take on the Charles Dickens classic may well find themselves surprised at quite how closely this fourth feature film from Kermit & Co hews to the spirit of the novella. Director Brian Henson’s neatest conceptual trick is to employ dual narrative devices, inserting Gonzo (as Dickens) at a remove from the main action, to narrate and provide a little commentary with his pal, Rizzo the Rat. The Muppet Christmas Carol is also a technical marvel, the soundstage wizardry creating a richly textured milieu. It may be a story we all know inside out, but it’s rarely been delivered in a manner so deeply felt (sorry). 

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas musicals

Director: Henry Selick

Back in 1993, Tim Burton was on a roll following Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and a pair of Batman films (1989/1992). He’d written a poem inspired by a store window changing its decorations from Halloween to Christmas, a “Grinch-in-reverse tale of someone who loves Christmas so much, he tries to do it himself,” leading to this stop-motion animated classic directed by Henry Selick. We’ve regular Burton collaborator Danny Elfman to thank for the musical side of things, never better than when the Pumpkin King protagonist first arrives in Christmas Town to sing ‘What’s This?’ 

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas musicals

Director: John Pasquin

A bad-dad Christmas movie which sees Tim Allen don a fat suit and learn the true meaning of family and fatherhood after he accidentally agrees to become Santa due to a contractual clause. Enjoyment of this sickly concoction of fat jokes and sentimentality depends on your appreciation of Allen’s Home Improvement shtick, even if it does have a darker humour about coming to terms with blended families underneath the surface. 

– Katherine McLaughlin

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Having gathered a bunch of luvvie misfits for a New Year reunion in Peter’s Friends (1992), Kenneth Branagh did much the same thing in this monochrome comedy, albeit with a pre-Christmas setting. Remaining behind the camera for the first time, writer-director Branagh nevertheless conveys his love of Shakespeare by having depressed actor Joe Harper (Michael Maloney) travel to Hope in Derbyshire with an ad hoc company in order to mount a production of Hamlet in an effort to keep the village church out of the clutches of some soulless developers.

- David Parkinson, writing in 10 great British Christmas films

Director: Renny Harlin

“Mrs Claus is hot!” shouts a teenager at the Christmas parade in which Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) is decked out as Santa’s wife. Ever since she washed up on a beach eight years prior, this wholesome small-town homemaker has had total amnesia. When she hits a deer on the way home from a Christmas party, flashes of her past come flooding back, pointing to a previous life as a deadly assassin. With a little help from Samuel L. Jackson’s turtleneck-sporting shamus, she quickly finds out she’s as handy with a knife as she is with a rifle – and pretty good with a pair of ice skates too.

- Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas action films

Director: Curtis Hanson

“Come on guys it’s Christmas”, pleads Guy Pearce’s strait-laced cop as a mob of tanked up Los Angeles police officers make their way from an Xmas party to brutally attack Mexican civilians in jail. Curtis Hanson’s gritty film noir adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel features a fictionalised version of the real life Bloody Christmas attack of 1951 and its aftermath through three (un)wise cops played by Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Pearce. A dark yet depressingly relevant exposé of corruption on its release and now. 

– Katherine McLaughlin

Director: Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron’s update of The Shop Around the Corner seems charmingly quaint in an age when people are forming romantic connections with AI chatbots. Tom Hanks is the business magnate with a heart who falls in love with Meg Ryan’s independent bookstore owner over AOL chat. The opening of his behemoth book shop tears apart her livelihood, yet their shared love of literature brings them together. Encroaching capitalism vs nostalgia and tradition is perfect Christmastime viewing.

– Katherine McLaughlin

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick’s final film is a perverse kind of Christmas movie, as Tom Cruise’s New York doctor embarks upon a nocturnal odyssey through a wintry, behind-closed-doors Manhattan, in a tailspin after his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) reveals a secret sexual fantasy. Based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1920s novella Dream Story, this slippery, seductive and gorgeously filmed last testament also has some of the most beautiful Christmas lights ever put on film.

- Sam Wigley

Director: Mary Harron

1980s excess and consumerism are personified through the anti-charisma of Patrick Bateman, played with dead-eyed intensity by Christian Bale. Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel decks the halls with blood splatter and is the perfect Christmas film for the social media age as it satirises the soulless, selfish and violently deluded ego of a man obsessed with high-end fashion brands and beauty products. The work Christmas party scene highlights how vacuous Bateman and his co-workers truly are. 

– Katherine McLaughlin

Director: Abel Ferrara

While the ‘plot’ of the excellent, little-seen ’R Xmas hinges on the kidnapping and ransom of a Dominican drug dealer, director Abel Ferrara shows little interest in engaging with the tropes of the thriller in any traditional sense. It’s a film steeped in ritual, emphasised through the dreamy, narcotic cutting patterns that serve to equate the holiday season with the commerce of the drugs business. Whether it’s the painstaking dividing, bagging and distribution of coke or the hunt for a popular toy – over which two women are seen fighting in an early scene – Ferrara’s wry detachment casts a typically subversive eye on the true meaning of Christmas. 

- Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas thrillers

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Handheld cameras bring naturalism to Lynne Ramsay’s story of a young woman (Samantha Morton) who wakes to find her boyfriend dead by suicide on Christmas Day. He’s left her some gifts, some money and the manuscript to his first novel, which she sends off, claiming it as her own. She then holidays in Spain and disposes of his corpse without reporting the death. Is she a victim or a murderer? Are we watching a breakdown? Callar barely says a word throughout the film. Tacky hotels, leaden skies and Christmas lights on lifeless bodies mingle abruptly. Alternating between specificity and hazy half-details, this strange, fragmented world feels at once haunting and achingly familiar, like memories of childhood Christmases past. 

– Georgina Guthrie, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 21st century

Director: Satoshi Kon

Satoshi Kon’s third feature may be the least conceptually audacious of his four features, but it’s arguably the most grounded and human, possessing an aching pathos that stabs at the gut in a manner befitting the Japanese masters of the 1950s. With a title that tips its hat to the much remade Three Godfathers story, Kon’s parable sees three not-so-wise homeless men (a man, a trans woman and a teenage girl) discover a baby in a dumpster at Christmas. Endlessly squabbling, they endeavour – via run-ins with gangsters and angels – to find her mother. It’s very funny, despite the heavyweight themes of abandonment and survival; a Christmas film that finds solace in the notion of family, however it might be cobbled together. 

– Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas comedies

Director: Wong Kar Wai

As a former British colony, Hong Kong celebrates Christmas with more enthusiasm than in other south-east Asian countries, but with fewer ties to religion (and Dickens). Perhaps because of this, Wong Kar Wai relegates it to the background. Smatterings of tinsel and Nat King Cole’s rich baritone pepper the film, but this is Christmas abstracted to luxurious fragments in a wider tale of missed connections and thwarted love. Following on from Chow Mo-wan’s (Tony Leung) unconsummated affair with Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) in In the Mood for Love (2000), 2046 spans four story arcs, each weaving in and around Christmas Eve.

– Georgina Guthrie, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 21st century

Director: Shane Black

Writer-director Shane Black came to prominence as the Lethal Weapon (1987) screenwriter, but his directorial debut is even funnier and more savage. Sometime NYC burglar turned accidental actor Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr) narrowly avoids arrest after robbing a department store at Christmas and ends up embroiled in a Hollywood murder plot, teaming up with razor-sharp private eye Gay Perry (Val Kilmer in perhaps his career-best performance).

– Lou Thomas

Director: Nancy Meyers

Nancy Meyer’s romcom is so saccharine it may make some viewers physically sick, but it also features a humdinger of a score by Hans Zimmer and amusing performances from Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet, who play heartbroken women who swap houses for a Christmas getaway. Jack Black’s Hollywood composer threatens to break into nonsense song every few minutes and Jude Law delivers one of cinema’s goofiest moments with ‘Mr Napkin Head.’ 

– Katherine McLaughlin, writing in 50 great Christmas films currently streaming

Directors: Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo

For those after something a little darker this Christmas, yuletide thrills don’t come more extreme than this jaw-droppingly violent number from French directing duo Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. A knock at the door for Alysson Paradis’ Sarah signals the start of a Christmas Eve nightmare. Nine-months pregnant and having barely survived the car crash that killed her husband, there’s little Sarah can do to keep Beatrice Dalle’s mysterious stranger out of her house. What begins as a creepy stalk-n-slash soon escalates into the genre’s most ferocious home invasion flick. 

- Matthew Thrift, writing in 10 great Christmas thrillers

Director: Arnaud Desplechin

All the hectic, strained chaos of a large family Christmas is captured in this sprawling domestic epic from Arnaud Desplechin. Catherine Deneuve plays the prosperous matriarch who drops the bombshell that she has leukemia and is seeking a bone marrow donor from among her grown-up children. With partners and kids, the bickering siblings – including Mathieu Amalric’s alcoholic Henri – descend on her home in the city of Roubaix on the Belgian border, where longstanding resentments, attractions and sadnesses bubble to the surface as the festivities get underway.

 - Sam Wigley, writing in 10 great European Christmas films

Director: Richard Kelly

The 1976 festive season moils in the background of Richard Kelly’s scorned adaptation of the Richard Matheson ‘Button, Button’ story that confronts disabled teacher Cameron Diaz and aspiring astronaut husband James Marsden with a moral dilemma after scarfaced stranger Frank Langella offers them a life-changing gift with onerous strings attached. A bell-ringing Santa has a creepy cameo prior to a car crash, but several eggnogs will be required to fathom this quirky excursion into the twilight zone.

– David Parkinson

Director: Radu Muntean

In Radu Muntean’s scalding infidelity drama, Paul (Mimi Brãnescu ) lives in an affluent neighbourhood of Bucharest with his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprişor), while holding down an affair with a younger woman (Maria Popistaşu), a dentist who’s treating his daughter. Paul knows the situation is unsustainable, but as Christmas nears his efforts to resolve it will send a riptide of pain and destruction through the lives of everyone involved. The stage is set for one of the most stinging dramatisations of the toxic effects of adultery in recent memory. 

- Sam Wigley

Director: Douglas Hart

The first moments of this short film suggest it will be a distressing domestic drama. And it is. But it’s also a bitter kind of comedy, something hinted at by the brilliant tagline “Dad always said not to talk to strangers. But you’ve got to phone home sometimes.” At 3pm on Christmas Day, a young Scottish man decides to call his father, from whom he is evidently estranged. To reveal any more is to reveal too much. …Long Distance Information seems to exist to offer proof of the observation, attributed to Charlie Chaplin, that “life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” The further our own lives are from the lives of the characters in the film, the funnier it seems. For many it will feel uncomfortably close to reality. It depicts the kind of Christmas that is seldom seen on film but that millions of people have experienced.

– Scott Jordan Harris, writing in 10 great Christmas short films

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

Christmas is about coming together and community spirit, yet in Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish drama, a kind school teacher is ousted and attacked by his fellow man after child abuse allegations surface. Mads Mikkelsen’s powerful performance as a man tested and brought down by the mob mentality is a masterclass in nuance. A confronting church scene on Christmas Eve is poignantly handled as Vinterberg’s camera pans across a tense room full of side-eyeing towards Mikkelsen’s tortured soul who finally explodes in pain and forces the town to bear witness to it all.

– Katherine McLaughlin

Director: Zach Clark

When real-estate agent Suzanne (Anna Margaret Hollyman) comes home to find her husband murdered in the run-up to Christmas, things understandably look bleak for the big day. As she picks through the sundry details of their shared life, she discovers secrets – including her husband’s relationship with a sex worker, who she meets and ultimately befriends. A little optimistic? Perhaps, but this is a light film, despite its grim premise. As Suzanne attempts to feel Christmassy via clubbing, internet shopping and sex parties, she discovers death creates a gulf between her and the things she once loved. But when one door closes another opens, or so the saying goes. There’s a glimmer of light in even the bleakest of winters.

– Georgina Guthrie, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 21st century

Director: Charles Poekel

Self-medication and heartbreak dominate Charles Poekel’s perfectly portioned slice of New York life, which sees Christmas tree salesman Noel battle with the nightshift and its eccentric punters. Small in scale but big on emotions, the film sees the numbness of Noel slowly warmed as good deeds overpower cynicism. It’s a film that subtly balances the lows of isolation with the highs of charitable actions through a central character who becomes grateful for his life when humbled with kind human interaction and community.

– Katherine McLaughlin

• Christmas, Again is currently in UK cinemas for the first time.

Director: Todd Haynes

With characteristic poise, Cate Blanchett plays the eponymous Carol, a soon-to-be divorced mother who loses custody of her daughter once proven ‘immoral’. The transgression? Having a love affair with another woman. Rooney Mara plays Therese, the wide-eyed innocent seduced by the older, more affluent and self-assured Carol. Director Todd Haynes sets this tale of forbidden desire, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, against a seasonal backdrop, where the festivities bring swooningly romantic lights and snow flurries, while effectively heightening the loneliness and dislocating the two women from those enjoying the simple pleasures of the season. 

– Georgina Guthrie, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 21st century

Director: Sophy Romvari and Deragh Campbell

This delicate Canadian short is co-directed by Sophy Romvari, who made an acclaimed feature debut in 2025 with Blue Heron, and Deragh Campbell, a starring regular for Toronto-based filmmakers Sofia Bohdanowicz and Kazik Radwanski. Celebrating small gestures, the focus falls on a woman decorating her tree alone for the first Christmas since the end of her relationship. Meet Me in St Louis (1944) has been keeping her company, but she’s glad to see an old friend, who has bought her a new star to mark her fresh start. 

– David Parkinson

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Paul Thomas Anderson’s typically arresting drama sees austere and exacting fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis) fall for waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps) while his watchful sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) glares from the sidelines. A wintry tale of tricky emotional manipulation for the most part, opulent Christmas decorations and a spectacular New Year’s Eve party bring warmth and colour to the chilly proceedings.

– Lou Thomas

Director: Ben Wheatley

Long-suppressed grudges are aired in this Ben Wheatley tale set in a rented pile in Dorset. The cast is credited for its improvisatorial contribution to a screenplay that makes every eavesdropped word uttered at the New Year’s Eve bash hosted by the far from genial Colin (Neil Maskell) clang with authenticity, particularly after uninvited sibling David (Sam Riley) puts in a belated appearance. With Laurie Rose’s handheld camera denying anyone a hiding place, this lacerating festive farce confirms that every family across Britain is different in pretty much the same way.

- David Parkinson, writing in 10 great British Christmas films

Director: Greta Gerwig

‘Jingle Bells’ was written a short sleigh-ride away and just a few years prior to the events of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. We’re in Massachusetts in the mid-19th century, and Greta Gerwig’s gorgeous recent adaptation features a suitably nostalgic vision of a period Christmas. It begins as Saoirse Ronan’s Jo March opens her window on to a landscape of fallen snow on Christmas morning and sighs: “Happy Christmas, world.” 

– Sam Wigley

Director: Cristi Puiu

This opulent philosophical epic is set entirely in a vast Transylvanian manor house and its snowy grounds over Christmas around the year 1900. At leisure over the festive period, the landowner and his guests – including a politician, a countess and a general and his wife – embark on a series of lengthy debates on subjects including war, religion, Russian identity and European culture. Cristi Puiu’s 200-minute drama is a three-bird roast of a Christmas film. It has the becalmed pace of a Christmas in lavish seclusion, where the conversation is likely to either invigorate or infuriate.

- Sam Wigley, writing in 10 great European Christmas films

The story begins on Christmas Day in King Arthur’s court. An enormous green knight (Ralph Ineson) approaches the head table and challenges Arthur (Sean Harris) to a game – a strike from his best man in exchange for a strike from the stranger, to be dealt on the same day the following year. Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) steps up and chops off the stranger’s head. The stranger pops it back on, bidding the young man adieu for now. Our green friend is to teach him it’s not singular events that make the person but an accumulation of small deeds from one Christmas to the next.

– Georgina Guthrie, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 21st century

Director: Alice Rohrwacher

Oscar-nominated for best live action short, this 38-minute wonder is the gift of an unlikely link up between Disney and the brilliant Italian magic-realist director Alice Rohrwacher. It’s a whimsical Christmas story set in a Catholic girls’ boarding school in Italy during World War II, where – as the hours count down towards Christmas Day – the baking of a cake sets a context for a spot of mischievous rebellion. 

– Sam Wigley

Director: Alexander Payne

Striking the balance between festive froth and downbeat realism, Alexander Payne’s film channels the age-old Christmas problem: how do you survive the holidays when you’re holed up with someone you don’t like? Paul Giamatti is pitch-perfect as a curmudgeonly teacher with a boss-eye and bad BO placed in charge of looking after students left behind over the holidays – which, unhappily for him, includes one of the class ne’er-do wells. Both have their preconceived ideas about what the other is like, all of which are upended via a series of unhappy revelations.

– Georgina Guthrie, writing in 10 great Christmas films of the 21st century

Director: Tyler Taormina

What begins as a chaotic Christmas Italian-American family portrait in Long Island suddenly turns into an engrossing hangout movie in Tyler Taormina’s underrated and tender take on the festive film. The deeply personal meets adolescent rite of passage as a teen sneaks out of the family home to be with friends and get up to mischief. Overflowing with comic charm and melancholy this is an elegantly filmed and lovingly observed slice of life reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s best work.

– Katherine McLaughlin

Director: Celia Aniskovich

Four family entrepreneurs and a shadowy scientologist, who is described as the “Keyser Söze of Christmas”, reveal the rivalry and logistics behind the sidewalk Christmas tree trade in New York. This riotous documentary by Celia Aniskovich, opens with a jolly, reality TV style introduction to the main players, yet goes to unpredictable places with dark twists about turf wars and the mafia. It’s a shocking, hilarious and bittersweet portrayal of the festive hustle. 

– Katherine McLaughlin