The 30 Best Christmas Movies of All Time

Written by the late, great John Hughes, and adapted from one of his short stories in the National Lampoon, this entry in the Vacation series of films contains a series of memorable scenes, from an electrocuted cat and a burned-down Christmas tree to a SWAT team storming the Griswold family home. Plus, a rich score by David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. But it’s most notable for Chevy Chase’s pitch-perfect take on Clark Griswold, the perpetually in-over-his-head dad.  

People love to hate on this shamelessly Christmas-y Richard Curtis rom-com, and the 9/11-tribute opening and fat jokes are indeed cringe, but this series of interconnected stories exudes such positivity, and contains so many lovely performances from it’s A-list cast, that it still soars. Where else can you get Hugh Grant as the U.K. prime minister dancing around 10 Downing Street to Girls Aloud or Emma Thompson quietly weeping to Joni Mitchell?

The Red Ryder air rifle. That leggy fishnet-stocking table lamp. A tongue stuck to the metal flagpole. Bob Clark’s film, told in a series of nostalgia-soaked vignettes, tells the tale of a 9-year-old boy in 1940 navigating the awkwardness of Christmas season. It’s a relatively thin story and contains some regrettable scenes around a visit to a Chinese restaurant but has become a seasonal staple.

This Canadian slasher flick was inspired by a series of real-life murders in Montreal and has subsequently inspired every slasher flick to come in its wake, from Halloween to Scream. The film centers on a sorority house’s Christmas party where a killer named “Billy” first torments the young women with a series of menacing phone calls before stalking and killing them one by one. Olivia Hussey is fantastic as the original final girl, as is Margot Kidder, and much of the film — from the police not believing the women’s cries for help to the lead choosing to have an abortion — feels refreshingly progressive given its Seventies release.

Before they lit up the screen together in Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray starred in this Preston Sturges-penned rom-com about a woman arrested for stealing a bracelet from a New York City jewelry store just before Christmas and the assistant district attorney assigned to her case who embark on a road trip while she’s out on bail and fall in love. The script hums along and Stanwyck and MacMurray’s chemistry is electric.

Directed by Penny Marshall and developed by Denzel Washington’s production company, this Christmas-set rom-com involves an angel (Washington) who’s sent down from heaven to help the pastor (Courtney B. Vance) of a Black Baptist church in New York City. With the pastor’s church targeted by voracious developers, who want to flip its land into luxury condos, and his marriage to his wife (Whitney Houston) in crisis, Dudley has his work cut out for him — especially when his feelings for Houston start to get in the way. Washington and Houston make for a winning onscreen pair, it’s bolstered by fine supporting turns from Loretta Devine, Jenifer Lewis, Gregory Hines, and Cissy Houston, and with her $10 million payday, the film made Houston the highest-paid Black actress in history at the time.

Sandra Bullock emanates goodwill as a forlorn token-taker for the Chicago Transit Authority who, on Christmas Day, rescues her businessman-crush (Peter Gallagher) after he’s mugged and pushed onto the tracks. He’s fallen into a coma, and she gets wrapped up in a lie that she’s his fiancée — and becomes so drawn to his kind, welcoming, weirdo family that she stays with it, all while catching feelings for his hunky younger brother, played by Bill Pullman. A lovely film and one of Bullock’s most winning performances.

One of the more sentimentalist entries on this list is this Christmas classic about a Macy’s department store Santa in New York City who claims he’s the real-life Santa Claus and is put on trial to prove it. Few Christmas movies better capture the magic of New York City around the holidays, with the entirety of the film shot on location — including capturing the actual 1946 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade — and features a young Natalie Wood as a young girl who believes the man to be the genuine article.

Only Nancy Meyers could deliver such a delectable wish-fulfilment fantasy, wherein two women fresh off disastrous breakups — the queen of cutting movie trailers (Cameron Diaz) and a London newspaper columnist (Kate Winslet) — swap homes for the holidays. Diaz ends up in a dreamy cottage in the U.K. countryside, and is immediately visited by an even dreamier Jude Law, while Winslet takes over a gated L.A. mansion, befriends a blacklist-era screenwriter (Eli Wallach), and cozies up to a composer (Jack Black). Being a fish out of water never looked so good.

It’s hard to believe a film pairing Will Ferrell and Zooey Deschanel as love interests could ever work, and yet Jon Favreau’s Christmas tale about a human (Ferrell) raised among Santa’s elves in the North Pole who travels to New York City in search of his biological father (James Caan) has an irresistible charm to it, mostly thanks to Ferrell’s deeply committed turn as Buddy the Elf, bringing his signature man-child shtick to a whole other level. Not to mention that the proceedings are narrated by Bob Newhart and have a supporting cast that includes Caan, Mary Steenburgen, Ed Asner, Amy Sedaris, and Peter Dinklage as a disgruntled children’s book author.

Two and a half weeks after Elf came Bad Santa, a Terry Zwigoff black comedy — conceived by the Coen brothers (really) — about a drunken, debauched mall Santa (Billy Bob Thornton) and his dwarf assistant (Tony Cox) who knock off malls on Christmas Eve. (Plus, a brilliant Bernie Mac.) When he’s not banging women in his dingy Impala or cursing around kids, Thornton’s Santa mentors a Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly), a young boy who’s bullied by a gang of skateboarders. It’s riotously funny and, with the exception of Sling Blade, the finest performance in Thornton’s career. The man should do comedy more often.

Airing as an NBC TV special, this short film from director Larry Roemer about a young reindeer named Rudolph with an illuminated red nose struggling to fit in is not only a triumph in stop-motion animation, but also responsible for the classic tune “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” sung in the film by Burl Ives’ Snowman.

With all due respect to Greta Gerwig, who is one of the finest directors working today, her version doesn’t quite measure up to Gillian Armstrong’s, which offered a stronger portrait of the March sisters’ bond, doesn’t erase Meg from the film, and features a stunning lead performance by Winona Ryder as its progressive protagonist, Jo. Christian Bale, who makes for a fine Laurie, also met his real-life wife on set, who was Ryder’s assistant.

Though it trades in retrograde Asian stereotypes, Joe Dante’s black comedy about an unbelievably cute mogwai named Gizmo (voiced by Howie Mandel) bought from a Chinatown store who spawns a number of hell-raising gremlins gives us some of the more memorable movie critters ever, and, thanks to the campaigning of executive producer Steven Spielberg, also gave birth to the PG-13 film rating.

As the story goes, it was legendary animator Chuck Jones who convinced Dr. Seuss to adapt his children’s book of the same name into this animated short about a curmudgeonly Grinch with “a heart two sizes too small” who tries to ruin Christmas for the cheery village of Whoville and ends up being won over by the meaning of it. Casting Boris Karloff as the voice of the Grinch was a masterstroke.  

Between Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Sixties was truly the golden age of Christmas TV specials (short films, really). And this adaptation of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comics offers a surprisingly enlightened take on seasonal depression, as Charlie Brown finds himself resenting the crass commercialism of Christmas whilst trying to direct a play celebrating the holiday and erecting the perfect little tree.  

The most chaotic and DIY entry on this list — shot with iPhones on a $100K budget with untrained actors — follows Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), a transgender sex worker who’s fresh out of jail and, after learning that her partner/pimp has been cheating on her, sets out on a Christmas Eve journey with her sex worker pal (Mya Taylor) through the mean streets of L.A. to find him. Like much of Baker’s oeuvre, it all feels so thrillingly real, and newcomers Rodriguez and Taylor, who were both discovered by the filmmaker at an L.A. LGBT Center, are a riot.

This MGM movie-musical follows a year in the life of the Smiths, a St. Louis family, in the lead-up to the 1904 World’s Fair. But it’s really a showcase for its bright shining star, Judy Garland, who plays Esther, the second Smith daughter who’s hopelessly in love with John (Tom Drake). Garland proves herself to be a formidable leading lady, and her rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is a doozy. Of course, this is also the project where she met director Vincente Minnelli, whom she would later marry and have a child (Liza Minnelli) with.  

You know that meme, “Pick a movie, keep one actor, the rest are played by Muppets?” We have this musical adaptation of Dickens’ novella to thank for it, wherein the greedy, unloving moneylender Ebenezer Scrooge (played by Michael Caine) is visited by a series of ghosts who teach him the meaning of Christmas, and to open his heart. The film consists of Caine — who is a delightful grump — surrounded by Muppets, and while it’s short on songs, it’s long on charm.

Written by John Hughes (The Breakfast Club), directed by Chris Columbus (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone), and featuring one of the all-time great child performances from Macaulay Culkin as a child forgotten at home by his vacationing family over Christmas and forced to contend with a pair of goofy robbers (Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern), it’s not just a wild romp filled with incredible sight gags that expertly captures the chaos of holiday travel but a metaphor for battling loneliness.

John Landis doesn’t get nearly enough credit for his run in the late Seventies and early Eighties — Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London. — culminating with this Christmas comedy classic about a pair of powerful financial brokers (Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche) who play god by engaging in a twisted social experiment wherein they swap a broke Black beggar (Eddie Murphy) with their white upper-crust commodities director (Dan Aykroyd) and track the results. The film features two dynamite comedy turns from Murphy and Aykroyd, a scene-stealing one from Jamie Lee Curtis as a prostitute who helps Aykroyd, and a sequence on the commodities trading floor that conveys just how fragile and easily manipulated the system is.

A stop-motion animated musical masterpiece from Henry Selick — and producer Tim Burton, who’s often miscredited as directing it — the film has exquisitely rendered figurines, indelible songs (courtesy of longtime Burton collaborator and alleged creep Danny Elfman), and to-die-for animation in service of an enchanted tale set in the monster world of Halloween Town who, wanting to shake things up, enters a portal to Christmas Town and turns everything upside down.

No Christmas movie is more revered than Frank Capra’s spin on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, despite its dark premise: George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), a good Samaritan who views himself as a failure, is experiencing suicidal ideation on Christmas Eve. So, he’s assigned a guardian angel who walks him through his life, reminding poor George of all the lives he’s touched. Jimmy Stewart is an eminently likable everyman, while Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter is one of cinema’s all-time bastards — a symbol of capitalism at its most rapacious. But more than anything, this is a story about seeing the good in humanity.

I’d be remiss not to shout-out the Nora Ephron remake, a ludicrous yet charming tale of a bookshop owner who falls for the chain bookstore CEO putting her out of business via email, but Ernst Lubitsch’s original, about a pair of salespeople (Margaret Sullavan, Jimmy Stewart) in a leather goods shop in Budapest who repel and then eventually attract one another, is a triumph of comedic timing and eye-catching cinematography that kicks things off with one of the greatest meet cutes ever.

Stanley Kubrick’s dark, labyrinthine study of marital desire and jealousy, starring then real-life partners Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a splintered New York City power couple, is so powerful it nearly wrested Cruise away from the Church of Scientology. It’s Kubrick’s Inferno — a trip through hell and back that saw high society Manhattan for the pervert-infested playground (see: Jeffrey Epstein) that it was and probably still is. Plus, there’s something wonderful about the last word in a Kubrick film being fuck.

Tim Burton’s magical story of a Frankensteinian monster with scissors for hands (Johnny Depp) who’s released by his creator (Vincent Price, in his last major film role) into a pastel-colored suburban wasteland and falls for his caretaker’s daughter (Winona Ryder) is noteworthy for its eye-catching hair, makeup, and production design, Depp’s expressive (largely wordless) lead performance, and every Alan Arkin line delivery. The scene where his loosey-goosey suburban dad gets Edward drunk in the basement is comedy gold.

Here are two of my favorite facts about John McTiernan’s shoot-‘em’-up: It’s actually based on a 1979 novel called Nothing Lasts Forever, where the terrorist ends up killing the retired cop’s daughter. And it’s the film acting debut of the late Alan Rickman who, despite being in his early 40s, had only acted on the stage until he portrayed German terrorist Hans Gruber. It’s a big reason why his performance sings — he plays Gruber as though he’s reciting Shakespeare. And it turned Bruce Willis from “that guy on Moonlighting” into a bona fide action hero. The everyman foil to his musclebound contemporaries Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

Any of the top five films on this list could be No. 1, including Billy Wilder’s rom-com about an overachieving, underappreciated insurance clerk (Jack Lemmon) who tries to curry favor with his higher-ups by letting them use his Upper West Side apartment to romance their mistresses. Of course, he ends up falling for one of them — Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), a self-possessed elevator operator in their building. Lemmon and MacLaine’s repartee is top-notch, as is Wilder’s direction. It’s also the only film on this list to win the Best Picture Oscar.

Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman is one of — if not the — greatest comic book villain in cinema history. Need I say more?

Directed by the great Todd Haynes and adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, no film better dramatizes our desire for connection and reciprocal love around the holidays than this story about an aspiring photographer and department store worker (Rooney Mara) who becomes infatuated with an older housewife (Cate Blanchett, a paragon of glamour and grace) in the midst of a divorce. You feel every ounce of danger these lovesick women feel as they brush up against society and its so-called “morality clauses.” The very definition of risking it all.