The films you already love. The ones worth loving again.
There’s a moment every November when I stop scrolling and just put something on. Something I already know. The opening credits roll, my shoulders drop, and I think — yes. This one. Tonight.
The best Christmas movies aren’t about surprise. They’re about return. You already know Kevin McCallister is going to outsmart those burglars. You know the Grinch’s heart is going to grow three sizes. You know Buddy the Elf is going to crash through New York City on a wave of pure, unstoppable Christmas spirit. And you watch anyway — because the pleasure was never really in the plot. It was in the feeling of settling back into something warm and familiar, like the best kind of homecoming.
These are the 25 films I come back to every year without fail, and I hope they do the same for you.
Some years I start with National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), because nothing sets the season off quite like watching Clark Griswold’s dream of the perfect Christmas detonate in slow, magnificent motion. Chevy Chase plays him with such committed, dignified desperation that the film gets funnier every year — funnier, somehow, the more Christmases you’ve lived through yourself.
From there it’s usually Home Alone (1990), which shouldn’t be as moving as it is. A boy alone on Christmas Eve, the house suddenly and completely his — and then the burglars arrive, and something switches on in Kevin McCallister that surprises even him. The traps are iconic. The warmth underneath them is what you actually remember.
Elf (2003) I save for when I need the season to feel genuinely magical again, because Will Ferrell as Buddy does something almost impossible: he plays a man who has never lost his wonder at the world, and he makes you feel it too, right alongside him. It’s one of the most purely joyful films ever made, Christmas or otherwise.
Scrooged (1988) gives you Bill Murray at his most Bill Murray — a ruthless TV executive cracked open by three ghosts — and the final monologue, which wanders a little off-script, is worth every minute of the film that precedes it. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) approaches the same Dickens story from the opposite direction: Michael Caine utterly sincere as Scrooge, the Muppets finding the funny thing inside the sad thing, Statler and Waldorf as the Marley brothers in a piece of casting so perfect it feels inevitable. I have never watched it without feeling better by the end.
Jingle All the Way (1996) is a film about a father who will do anything — anything — to come through for his son on Christmas morning, and the city-wide chaos that follows. Christmas with the Kranks (2004) asks what happens when two people try to simply opt out of Christmas, and discovers the answer is: the neighbourhood happens. Both films love their characters too much to leave them stranded, which is exactly the right instinct. A Bad Moms Christmas (2017) sends three women headlong into the season’s impossible expectations, and finds something warm and funny and true on the other side of the wrapping paper.
The films that move slower tend to stay with you longer.
The Santa Clause (1994) is built on a quietly extraordinary premise — a man accidentally takes Santa’s place and becomes him, incrementally, unstoppably — and it treats children’s belief with a tenderness that never tips into sentimentality. Four Christmases (2008) is funnier than its reputation and truer than it looks, a film about the way the holidays pull us back to who we were before we decided who we wanted to be. A Bad Moms Christmas aside, nobody puts Christmas and family chaos on screen quite like these films do, and nobody loves their characters through it quite as warmly.
Jack Frost (1998) is about a father who runs out of time and then, improbably, gets more of it — and Michael Keaton plays the tenderness of that second chance with everything he has. Prancer (1989) is quieter still: a young girl who finds an injured reindeer and knows, with the absolute certainty of childhood, that it belongs to Santa. The film never once questions her. Neither should you. The Preacher’s Wife (1996) — Denzel Washington as an angel, Whitney Houston luminous as the woman at the heart of it — is gentle and unhurried and so genuinely lovely that it’s a small mystery why it doesn’t appear on more lists.
Love Actually (2003) is the film I reach for when I want to feel the season at its fullest — ten love stories woven together in the weeks before Christmas in London, each one catching the way the holidays make love more visible, more urgent, harder to look away from. The airport sequence at the end is one of the most joyful things in Christmas cinema, full stop. The Holiday (2006) gives you two women swapping homes across an ocean and finding, in the unfamiliar, exactly what they needed — Nancy Meyers wrapping everything in the warmest possible light, making every room feel like an invitation. And The Family Stone (2005) earns its place here as the most grown-up film on the list: a big, real, imperfect family at Christmas, loving each other in the complicated way that real families do, funny and heartbreaking in the same breath.
For animation, nothing recent touches Klaus (2019) — hand-drawn and lit from within, a story about a toymaker and a postman and the way one act of kindness can change everything about a place. The Polar Express (2004) captures the exact, fleeting moment before you stop believing, the train at midnight, the hot chocolate, the ticket — and it holds that moment like something precious. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) has always belonged to both Halloween and Christmas, and Jack Skellington’s ache for something he can’t quite name is one of the most human feelings in any holiday film I’ve ever seen. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) is Jim Carrey giving everything he has to a story that gives it all right back — the makeup, the mountain, the heart that was always there waiting. And Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas (1999) I put on every year for the children in my life, and every year I watch every single minute myself.
The classics are last because they deserve to be savoured. White Christmas (1954) moves at the pace of another era and asks nothing of you except to sit still and let it work, which it does, completely, every time — Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye and a Vermont inn and no reason whatsoever to hurry. Miracle on 34th Street (1994) asks what it costs to believe in something you cannot prove, and answers with a little girl who watches everything very carefully and knows. The Christmas Chronicles (2018) and its sequel (2020) feel as energetic and alive as anything made in recent years, built around Kurt Russell as the most charismatic Santa the movies have given us — warm, funny, a little dangerous, impossibly right for the role.
Twenty-five films. Loud ones and quiet ones, old ones and new ones, animated ones that make children cry in the best way and classics that do the same thing to the rest of us. What every one of them understands is that Christmas is really just an invitation: to stop, to return, to let the season do what it does best.
Welcome you back.