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Tired: “My favorite Christmas movie is Die Hard.”
Wired: “My favorite Christmas movie is Eyes Wide Shut.”
You could be forgiven for finding the now-annual seasonal discourse vis à vis Die Hard’s status as a holiday movie exhausting. What began as a funny bit of trivia has become an ice cold hot take from the “funniest” guy in the office.—there’s even officially licensed, branded merchandise celebrating the film’s Christmas bona fides! Any discussion on the topic is purely academic at this point, and I think we’re all ready to move on.
The real question is, move on to what? Which only-technically-a-holiday-movie movie will emerge as the choice of “actually…” cineasts the internet over? Forgive me for suggesting that Die Hard could ever get old, but there will surely come a day, when you’ll want watch a different so-called Christmas movie. Tastes and seasonal holiday celebrations may vary, but here are 28 reasonable alternatives.
The Thin Man (1934)
As a not-Christmas movie, The Thin Man is about as festive as they come, with much of the major action set during a boozy holiday party and a subsequent hungover Christmas morning, during which Nick and Nora, two grown adults sans children, open their presents and have the sort of laid-back good time that the day affords only to the childless. Sequels would soon introduce Nick Jr., so this is the last time the Charles family will be able to spend Christmas quite so drunk.
Will it become your next holiday classic? Mix a martini and pop it on every Dec. 24.
Where to stream: Max
Night of the Hunter (1955)
Actor Charles Laughton’s sole directorial effort finds Robert Mitchum’s creepy and seductive (but mostly creepy) preacher murdering his way through the local spinsters as an occupation, while also believing that he’s on a righteous path. It builds to a Christmas scene, and also a lynch mob, with the strong suggestion that being able to quote from the Bible isn’t even remotely the same thing as having true compassion.
Will it become your next holiday classic? Set up a little tree on your raft as you flee down the river.
Where to stream: Tubi, MGM+, Hoopla, Pluto
The Apartment (1960)
Set largely between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Billy Wilder’s Best Picture-winner was wildly controversial when it was released—and also managed to score a ton of awards, ushering in a new era in Hollywood filmmaking. Jack Lemmon plays Bud Baxter, an insurance clerk who’s climbed the corporate ladder by loaning out his apartment to higher-ups to use for their extramarital affairs. In the midst of all this, a fraught affection develops between Bud and Shirley MacLaine’s Fran, the office building’s elevator operator, a woman who’s herself been in a loveless, joyless affair with Bud’s boss. As is so often the holiday season in real life, the plot is as dark as it gets for each of them, until a few glimmers of seasonal spirit shine through.
Will it become your next holiday classic? If the similarly grim It’s a Wonderful Life can become a holiday favorite, then there’s no reason The Apartment can’t follow suit. (Like that movie, this one involves themes of suicide, something for viewers sensitive to that type of content to keep in mind.)
Where to stream: MGM+, Fubo
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
A soaring, candy-colored musical about young lovers (Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo) separated by circumstance in the titular city. Pretty much every word is sung, in French, and with operatic zeal…but without the highfalutin’ style that implies. The film’s climax arrives on Christmas Eve, but it’s a bittersweet holiday (the movie itself takes place across a little more than a year).
Will it become your next holiday classic? One of the most beautiful films ever made, certainly in terms of its color palette, it also offers romance that’s somehow both realistic and wonderfully melodramatic. So, I’m thinking yes.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, Kanopy
Female Trouble (1974)
Christmas is kickoff for the chaos that unfolds in this twisted John Waters’ classic. When she fails to receive the cha-cha heels she wanted from Santa, juvenile delinquent Dawn Davenport sets off on a lifetime’s worth of troublemaking. It’s one of the most memorable holiday moments in movie history, and a stark lesson about the importance of giving your kids what they really want.
Will it become your next holiday classic? John Waters isn’t for everyone, but for those of us who dream of cha-cha heels come Christmastime, this is 100% a movie that can be watched every year.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Ordinary People (1980)
Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore star in this Best Picture Oscar-winner about a family’s collapse following the accidental death of their older teenage son. The film’s pivotal scene occurs at Christmas, when the surviving sibling’s resentment at his mother explodes during a family photoshoot.
Will it become your next holiday classic? Worth a watch, but I’m going to say no…unless your family life is so devoid of trauma and drama that you feel the need to live through a tragedy vicariously.
Where to stream: Max
Brazil (1985)
Christmas goes to hell in the dystopian, but increasingly prescient sci-fi film from Terry Gilliam. A happy family watches Tiny Tim on the telly at the movie’s opening, only for a clerical error to send a SWAT team dropping into their living room. We’re very quickly out of “A Christmas Carol” and into a bureaucratic, capitalist hellscape (aka “life”). Brazil sees characters believing wild things and struggling to distinguish reality from fantasy in a world where elites control the flow of information with ease. Imagine!
Will it become your next holiday classic? It’s probably a little on-the-nose in our present to be any kind of comfort viewing, but it’s certainly worth watching at least once.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Less Than Zero (1987)
Straight-laced college freshman Clay (Andrew McCarthy) returns to Los Angeles over Christmas vacation to find that his old pals (Jami Gertz, Robert Downey, Jr., and James Spader) are living a very ‘80s lifestyle of sex, drugs, and debauchery. They’re all definitely having a very white Christmas, if you get my drift, but it’s not snow that’s falling in L.A. (It’s cocaine. I’m talking about cocaine.)
Will it become your next holiday classic? This one’s probably generational, but people who lived through the ’80s might enjoy a snort of nostalgia.
Where to stream: Starz
Die Hard II (1990)
Maybe you’re getting bored watching the first Die Hard over and over and over again, but aren’t looking to stray too far from the “Bruce Willis shoots up terrorists” genre. It’s worth remembering that Die Hard 2 is also a Christmas movie—it’s set on Christmas Eve, two years after the first film. Unlike so many sequels, it’s almost as enjoyable as the first, and it really gets how terrible it is to travel for the holidays, so there’s no reason not to mix things up a bit.
Will it become your next holiday classic? It probably won’t replace the first movie in your yuletide viewing queue, but it’ll at least make for a pleasant (by which I mean loud) double feature.
Where to stream: Hulu
Batman Returns (1992)
The holiday season in Gotham is about as weird as you’d hope, with a moody penguin-man running for mayor and a seductive leather mama skipping around, robbing jewelry stores and stealing hearts. As Bat-movies go, Returns offers the best blend of the campy sensibilities of old with the psychological, obsessively dark modern Caped Crusader.
Will it become your next holiday classic? The movie’s central Christmas tree lighting action sequence involves a woman thrown from a building, but it’s generally no less violent than Die Hard, and holiday themes persist throughout (mistletoe is deadly if you eat it, you know). It’s probably your best bet if you aim to have a superhero holiday.
Where to stream: Max, Prime Video
Cronos (1993)
Guillermo del Toro’s brilliant debut sees an elderly antiques dealer and his granddaughter opening up a centuries-old archangel statue to find a scarab that transforms the man into something very like a vampire. It’s set during the holiday season, but the Christmas connections are mostly thematic; death and rebirth, temptation, and potential redemption abound.
Will it become your next holiday classic? Del Toro turns Christmas on its head and challenges orthodoxy, making it a great choice for the holiday-skeptical. All of the director’s movies are highly rewatchable, so I say keep bloody vampire Christmas in your heart, this and every year.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Star Trek Generations (1994)
How better to spend Christmas than with the ninth or tenth best Star Trek movie? Though the series typically avoids anything to do with religion, Generations finds Captain Picard briefly trapped in the Nexus, an extra-dimensional realm that seduces you by allowing you to live out your fantasies. Picard, it seems, dreams of a large family Christmas with a vaguely old-timey milieu. The result is a bit of a spin on It’s a Wonderful Life, with Jean-Luc witnessing a vision of his what his life might be like if he’d never set out for the stars.
Will it become your next holiday classic? It’s the only one on this list with anything remotely resembling a Christmas theme, but there are better Star Trek movies to watch over and over.
Where to stream: Paramount+
The Ref (1994)
Stand-up Dennis Leary plays a crook who winds up taking a couple (Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey) hostage when a job goes wrong; the joke’s on him, because the two are at each other’s throats every moment. They’re really the most bitter, hateful people imaginable, and Leary’s robber/hostage-taker winds up as not only the movie’s most likable character, but also the peacemaker, especially after the rest of the family shows up for Christmas Eve dinner. Terrible in-laws? At a holiday meal? Can you imagine?
Will it become your next holiday classic? It’s a bit caustic to make the regular rotation, but it’ll offer a palate-cleansing break from holiday schmaltz.
Where to stream: Hoopla
Babe (1995)
Babe offers a complex vision of the holiday season best summarized by the line: “Christmas means carnage!” At least, it does for the delightful anthropomorphic animals of Hoggett’s farm. On one level, it’s an entire movie about the title pig learning the dark secret of the season, and then doing whatever he can to charm his way out of the oven.
Will it become your next holiday classic? It’s delightful, but you might want to skip the ham at dinner afterward—Oscar nominee James Cromwell turned vegan during filming.
Where to stream: Starz
The City of Lost Children (1995)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s surreal classic involves not just one, but several Santas—most of them pretty scary, honestly, but that’s hardly the point. The film concerns Krank, an elderly being whose inability to dream has made him malicious and cruel; now he kidnaps children and steals their dreams to survive. The father of one of Krank’s victims (Ron Perlman) joins forces with an orphan (Judith Vittet) to rescue the kidnapped children. There’s a strong overarching theme of family, found and otherwise, that cements the holiday feel.
Will it become your next holiday classic? It’s surreal and a little scary in places, but also a lovely fairytale, with warm seasonal themes throughout.
Where to stream: Tubi
L.A. Confidential (1997)
What could possibly be more festive than a movie that kicks off with a Christmas party? At this particular “Bloody Christmas” shindig, based on real events, a bunch of LAPD officers get drunk and beat up several (mostly Mexican-American) prisoners—the kind of thing that could definitely only happen in the past and that clearly has no present day relevance whatsoever. Bing Crosby’s music is a motif throughout, though, and the entire thing set during the holiday season. Ho ho ho!
Will it become your next holiday classic? It’s as dark as Christmas movies come, but no more violent than Die Hard.
Where to stream: Plex
End of Days (1999)
Channelling now quaint change-of-millennium anxieties, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s team-up with director Peter Hyams (Timecop) for the story of former NYPD detective Jericho Cane (beat that for an on-the-nose character name) battling Satan (in the guise of Gabriel Byrne) during the holiday season—and if the devil’s baby is born by New Year’s Eve, it will signal the titular end of days. It’s all a little (a lot) silly, but fun a fun way to smooth out the wrinkles in your brain during a sleepy holiday afternoon.
Will it become your next holiday classic? Suffused with Catholic imagery and taking place over the holidays, it could make for a fun Christmas watch—though it probably won’t stand up to repeated viewings.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Go (1999)
By far the best of the post-Pulp Fiction imitators of the late ‘90s, Go also features the best cast (Taye Diggs, Sarah Polley, Jane Krakowski, Timothy Olyphant, etc.) and the trickiest script, telling the overlapping stories of a holiday drug deal gone wrong. Though there’s not much Christmas spirit on display here (there’s no learning, and none of the characters are even particularly good people), the movie reminds us frequently, and maybe a bit ironically, when this is all going down—the inclusion of a mid-movie Christmas-themed rave serving that purpose particularly well.
Will it become your next holiday classic? If you’re looking for an antidote to all that holiday cheer, then absolutely. (And for the thirsty, shirtless Timothy Olyphant wears a Santa hat.)
Where to stream: Digital rental
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
There are an extremely limited number of dreamy, erotic mysteries that simultaneously qualify as Christmas movies—that number might in fact be one, and it’s Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick’s swan song begins at a vaguely naughty, adults-only Christmas party and ends with a more conventional bit of holiday shopping with the kids. Those scenes bookend a shadowy stroll through New York in winter and a ritualistic orgy, and so the film really captures every aspect of the season.
Will it become your next holiday classic? You could do worse than to spend the holidays with Kubrick…but maybe wait for the kids to go to bed first.
Where to stream: Showtime
Cast Away (2000)
The opening scenes play like a textbook version of a Hallmark/Lifetime-style Christmas movie: Tom Hanks’ Chuck Nowland is a workaholic who abandons Christmas dinner in order to deal with a work problem. Only his work problem is in Malaysia, setting the FedEx executive off on a date with destiny in the form of a horrific plane crash and a volleyball named Wilson. Following that aviation disaster, most of the rest of the movie takes place on a deserted island, but “this all could have been avoided if you didn’t go to work on Christmas!” remains the overarching leitmotif.
Will it become your next holiday classic? Nowland’s isolation could seem like a desirable fantasy amid the chaos of a family visit, though nervous air travelers might wish to avoid it altogether.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Ice Harvest (2005)
An entirely under-the-radar neo-noir from the late Harold Ramis, The Ice Harvest situates its action on Christmas Eve, a time when only the most interesting people are out and about in the world. John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton play con men who just ripped off a mobster to the tune of $2 million. All they want to do is get out of town, a goal complicated by an ice storm that’s closed the roads, forcing them to cool their heels while avoiding their pursuers.
Will it become your next holiday classic? It’s a pitch-perfect noir following the cascading, complex events of a harrowing Christmas Eve, so it’s a great contender if you’re looking for something to put your personal holiday chaos in perspective.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Maybe don’t rob a toy store on Christmas? That’s about as close to a seasonal message you’ll get out of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but we’re not necessarily here for that. The muted holiday trappings of an LA Christmas are on display, embodied (pardon the pun) in Michelle Monaghan’s tight-fitting Santa suit. Director Shane Black has a whole thing about setting his movies around Christmastime, so you could always pair this one with Iron Man III and settle down to dreams of holidays with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer. This one is almost certainly Black’s best, though.
Will it become your next holiday classic? As an action alternative to Die Hard with a similarly charismatic leading man, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang might be a perfect substitute.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Proposition (2005)
It’s Christmastime in the old west (1880s Australia, actually, but western movie style abounds), and there’s murder in the offing. In this case, it involves a choice given to renegade Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) by lawman Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone): Burns must either hunt down and kill his older brother, wanted for rape and murder, or his younger brother, already in custody for lesser crimes, will hang. That decision kicks off a contemplative journey through the outback, one drenched in tremendous performances and style, if nary a hint of festive greenery.
Will it become your next holiday classic? It might be a bit too quiet for sleepy Christmas Day viewing, but it deserves a spot somewhere on your holiday watchlist.
Where to stream: Peacock, Tubi, Crackle, The Roku Channel, Freevee, Vudu, Kanopy, Pluto, Plex
In Bruges (2008)
Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play a pair of not-so-great hitmen lying low in the title city, as ordered by their increasingly volatile boss (Ralph Fiennes). This dark comedy is packed with smart, funny dialogue, and the almost paternal relationship between the two assassins is genuinely charming…as is the Belgian Christmastime setting. Still, it’s a movie about hitmen that kicks off with the killing of a kid in a church, so the laughs are of a very particular kind.
Will it become your next holiday classic? It’s definitely got a well-earned reputation as a cult classic, so I’d say there’s a good chance it’s one you’ll want to return to.
Where to stream: Starz
Tangerine (2015)
Two trans sex workers (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) set out across yuletide Los Angeles, on the hunt for Rodriguez’s character’s cheating boyfriend/pimp. There aren’t a ton of queer holiday movies (unless Meet Me in St. Louis counts), and Tangerine compellingly explores a Christmas on the margins. It’s set in sunny LA, so the festive trappings are muted—and for the leads, “family” would hardly mean group photos in cozy sweaters anyway—but it’s Christmas all the same. A haunting, gorgeous rendition of “Toyland” seals the deal.
Will it become your next holiday classic? This could be your queer Die Hard, no question.
Where to stream: Mubi, Fubo, Kanopy, Plex
Carol (2015)
The chemistry between Rooney Mara’s Therese and Cate Blanchett’s Carol is palpable from the moment their eyes meet across a crowded department store—Therese is working the Christmas rush, while Carol is a glamorous older woman going through a divorce and shopping for her daughter. It’s 1952, and theirs is a love that dare not speak its name, even to one another. The women suffer for their love, but not exclusively; ’tis the season for both heartbreak and romance.
Will it become your next holiday classic? Christmas could always stand to be a little gayer, and this one is already a queer classic.
Where to stream: Netflix
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
A seasonal romance that culminates in a Hanukkah celebration, Call Me By Your Name’s sweaty Northern Italian setting doesn’t scream winter festivities…but who needs snow, anyway? You just need a peach and a cozy fire in front of which to cry artfully. The ending even involves themes of perseverance and renewal, and is therefore wonderfully thematic.
Will it become your next holiday classic? Armie Hammer’s problematic persona complicates the movie’s reputation, but Call Me By Your Name otherwise makes for a bittersweet holiday romance.
Where to stream: Netflix
Spencer (2021)
Pablo Larraín’s moody and idiosyncratic biopic breaks almost all of the rules of the genre, to great effect. Kristen Stewart plays Diana, Princess of Wales, spending the Christmas holiday at the royal family’s estate at Sandringham as the tabloids attack from the outside and her own in-laws eat away at her from within the palace. It’s kind of like The Shining, but with too many royals subbing in for all the ghosts.
Will it become your next holiday classic? I’m not sure it’s endlessly rewatchable, but the dreamy vibe is well-suited to a long winter’s night.
Where to stream: Hulu