12 Best Christmas Movies of All Time
What's Christmas without seasonal movies to get you feeling all the holiday feels? Christmas has come to represent different things to people over the years, and the movies here reflect that in kind. While any list of best contain a strong dose of subjectivity, a list of the Best Christmas Movies of All Time is even less constrained by questions of cinematic quality and other, objective criteria.
Here are the best 10 Christmas movies of all time:
1. It's a Wonderful Life
Few films define Christmas like Frank Capra's 1946 fantasy starring Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, who, on the verge of committing suicide, is visited by an angel who shows him the importance of his life.
2. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Rarely has a series' third installment been the equal of its two predecessors, but such is the case with this threequel involving Clark (Chevy Chase), Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo), Audrey (Juliette Lewis), and Rusty Griswold's (Johnny Galecki) mishap-besieged family get-together.
3. A Christmas Story
Nine years after Black Christmas, director Bob Clark made another holiday classic—albeit of a very different sort—when he launched this still-beloved saga of nine-year-old Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley), who wants nothing more for Christmas than an air rifle.
4. White Christmas
Featuring a new version of the song from which the film gets its title, this 1954 musical features Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-act partners who team up with two sisters (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) to help their former military commander save his Vermont lodge.
5. Home Alone
Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is forgotten by his family and forced to battle a couple of dimwit thieves (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) around Christmas in this enduring children's adventure from director Chris Columbus and writer John Hughes.
6. A Christmas Carol (1984)
George C. Scott leads this British made-for-television adaptation of A Christmas Carol, in which he gives his very all to the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. (It was also directed by Clive Donner, who was an editor on the original 1951 Scrooge film.)
7. Miracle on 34th St.
You can't go wrong with this Christmas staple about the trial of a man claiming to be Santa Claus. (The original is great, but the 1994 remake starring Richard Attenborough and Mara Wilson is pretty good, too).
8. Bad Santa
Billy Bob Thornton's thieving department store Santa injects some nasty deviancy into the Yuletide season in this uproarious black comedy.
9. Die Hard
Ho-ho-ho, he's got a machine gun—Bruce Willis's John McClane, that is, while battling terrorists in John McTiernan's peerless, one-against-many action classic.
10. Deck the Halls
Matthew Broderick plays a dad whose overly ordered world turns into disarray with the arrival of his kooky neighbor, Danny DeVito. There’s then a contest of who can have more elaborate Christmas decorations and things turn predictably out of hand.
11. Trading Places
There’s not much reason for this prince-and-pauper story to take place at Christmastime except that, in Philadelphia, it’s mighty cold on the streets, as Eddie Murphy already knows, and as Dan Aykroyd quickly learns.
12. This Christmas
A Christmastime drama centred around the Whitfield family's first holiday together in four years.
Cover Photo: Wix