The Best Christmas Movies (Yes, Die Hard Counts)

Adapted from Roderick Thorp's 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, John McTiernan's siege puts an off-duty cop in a half-finished Century City tower — Fox Plaza, standing in for Nakatomi — on the one night his wife's office throws a party. Everything the season does to people is in the stretch where McClane crosses an office floor barefoot over broken glass, wrecking himself inside a building he only came to for a marriage.

Satoshi Kon built it at Madhouse out of the bones of a 1948 John Ford picture, 3 Godfathers, and took Best Animation Film at the 58th Mainichi Film Awards. Gin, Hana and Miyuki — an alcoholic, a transgender woman and a teenage runaway — dig a live baby out of a rubbish heap on Christmas Eve and spend the rest of the film trying to hand her back. Kindness with nothing sentimental in it.

Parking the consensus winner third will annoy people, which is exactly the idea. Frank Capra adapted Philip Van Doren Stern's 1943 story The Greatest Gift, lost RKO $525,000 with it, and then watched the copyright lapse in 1974, after which free television broadcasts turned a flop into a fixture. What survives is not the angel but George's run back through Bedford Falls, bellowing at a building and loan he spent his life resenting.

Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond started from Brief Encounter, wondering about the poor man whose flat gets borrowed for other people's affairs, and won five Oscars at the 33rd Academy Awards including Best Picture. Christmas here is corporate: the raucous Christmas Eve office party is where the arrangement finally curdles, and Wilder keeps twisting until New Year's Eve. Bleakest thing on the list, and the funniest.

Cable did what the box office could not. Bob Clark's film took $19.2 million on release, then a full-day TNT marathon starting in 1997 made it permanent furniture. Clark adapted Jean Shepherd's 1966 book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and had Shepherd narrate it himself, shooting exteriors in Cleveland and interiors in Ontario. The leg lamp arriving in its crate is the best joke about wanting things anyone has filmed.

Brian Henson's first feature as director was also the first Muppet film made after his father died in 1990, and it is dedicated to Jim Henson and Richard Hunt. Michael Caine plays Scrooge entirely straight, which is why it lands. Statler and Waldorf turn up as the Marley brothers, hanging in chains and running a vaudeville double act about damnation. Jeffrey Katzenberg cut the song When Love Is Gone from the American theatrical release; Disney restored it in 2022.

Released on 8 June 1984 — a Christmas horror comedy in the first week of summer — and Box Office Mojo still books it $153.9 million, nearly all of it domestic. Chris Columbus wrote it and Steven Spielberg executive produced; the outcry over its violence, together with Temple of Doom, pushed the MPAA into inventing PG-13 within two months. Kate's monologue about her father dying in a chimney in a Santa suit is the meanest joke in any studio Christmas movie.

Warner Bros. shut the production down over cost and 20th Century Fox picked it up, and the $18 million result went on to take $476.7 million worldwide with two Oscar nominations for John Williams. John Hughes wrote and produced, Chris Columbus directed. What gets forgotten is how quiet the middle is: Kevin sitting in an empty church with the neighbour the street calls a murderer, listening to him talk about his estranged son.

Colour floods in the moment Jack finds the Christmas Town door out in the woods, and the film never quite recovers its composure. Tim Burton wrote the original poem in 1982; Henry Selick directed a decade later, and Disney released it through Touchstone Pictures having judged it too dark for children. Danny Elfman wrote the songs and sings Jack himself, which is why score and voice fit together so exactly.

Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt, republished under this film's title in 1990, is the source; Todd Haynes directed from Phyllis Nagy's screenplay and the result drew six Academy Award nominations. December is the machinery here rather than the decor — Therese is working a department-store toy counter when a customer leaves a pair of gloves behind, and that one piece of shopping-season carelessness starts everything.

Fox opened a Christmas picture in warm weather because Darryl F. Zanuck disliked it and thought summer sold more tickets; sources put that 1947 release in May or in June. Three Oscars followed anyway, including Best Supporting Actor for Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle. Sacks of letters addressed to Santa dumped onto the courtroom table solve a plot problem by bureaucratic faith alone. George Seaton directed this one, not the 1994 remake.

Jalmari Helander spent two shorts building this world — Rare Exports, Inc. in 2003 and The Official Safety Instructions in 2005 — before the feature arrived, a Finnish production with Norwegian, Swedish and French partners. Santa Claus is an ancient horned thing dug out of a mountain in Lapland, and the small boy who works that out is right about everything. Naked, feral old men herded across the snow is a sight the film never bothers explaining.

Forced perspective, not computer graphics, is how Jon Favreau made Will Ferrell tower over the North Pole; he has said he fought hard to keep the digital work out, chasing the look of the old Rankin/Bass television specials instead. James Caan plays the father, Bob Newhart the Papa Elf. Buddy eating spaghetti with maple syrup and crumbled Pop-Tarts survives a hundred rewatches because Ferrell plays it as a man enjoying his breakfast.

Soldiers climbed out of the trenches on the Western Front at Christmas 1914 and spent a night together, and Christian Carion stages that truce without picking a hero language, moving between English, German and French. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 78th Academy Awards. A German tenor walking out into no man's land, still singing, and the silence that comes back at him, does all the work.