It’s our most favorite time of year—also the time where we can spend a long day at the couch, looking for some films to watch.
No problem because this list will help you out. Grab some snacks and let’s keep going:
A Christmas Movie Christmas
If you have a love-hate relationship with Hallmark Christmas movies, then A Christmas Movie Christmas is perfect for you. It’s a gentle parody of those holiday romances that also functions as an earnest example of the genre. A pair of sisters, one who loves Christmas movies and one who can’t stand them, find themselves magically trapped in a Hallmark-style cinematic world.
The filmmakers mock the cheesy conventions of these predictable movies, while still pairing off both main characters with hunky love interests. It’s silly without being snarky, and even Hallmark haters might get wrapped up in it.
Feast of the Seven Fishes
Set in a Pennsylvania Rust Belt town in the early 1980s, Feast of the Seven Fishes finds universal truths by focusing on specific details. The title refers to a Christmas Eve tradition among Italian-American families of cooking seven different types of seafood, which the working-class Tony (Skyler Gisondo) invites the decidedly non-Italian Beth (Madison Iseman) to experience with him.
There’s a sweet across-the-tracks love story, along with dual coming-of-age narratives and plenty of loud family bonding, which is relatable regardless of what you eat on Christmas Eve.
Anna and the Apocalypse
Surely the only Christmas zombie movie musical ever made, Anna and the Apocalypse is remarkably adept at balancing those disparate elements. It’s a scary zombie movie, a feel-good celebration of holiday camaraderie, and a Broadway-worthy musical full of catchy songs. As Anna and her peers face the end of high school with various concerns, an undead apocalypse is unleashed in their small town, disrupting the annual Christmas stage production.
Even as the violence escalates, director John McPhail keeps the musical numbers coming, finding heartwarming moments amid the carnage.
Happiest Season
Sometimes the fact that Happiest Season — a queer holiday romcom following a woman who asks her girlfriend to pretend to be just friends over Christmas because she hasn’t come out to her parents that is co-written and directed by Clea DuVall, and stars Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, and Dan Levy — exists seems too good to be true. Sure, it sounds like it was designed in a lab specifically to become a favorite comfort movie for people everywhere, but it is, in fact, a real film, and we must not take that for granted.
Let It Snow
Snow storms — the kind that shut everything down and force you inside until it’s over, mean something a lot different as an adult than they did while we were younger. Let It Snow is cheery YA movie starring Isabela Merced, Shameik Moore, Liv Hewson, Kiernan Shipka, Jacob Batalon, and more — takes place in a small midwestern town that gets snowed in on Christmas Eve, bringing its high school students together in unexpected ways. It will bring you right back to the nostalgic, joyful days seeing piles of snow didn’t make you groan.
Metropolitan
Metropolitan captures the strange magic of New York after Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year happens after the holidays in the city, where the buzzing of Christmas lights, the silence of falling snow, and the quiet solitude of the end of the year come together to create something wonderful. Metropolitan masters this in a critique of the spoiled bourgeoise.
A radical student is adopted by a group of young New Yorkers and serves as a catalyst that alters each of their lives. The group of friends gathers in a Manhattan apartment to comfortably discuss social mobility and play bridge in their cocoon of upper-class society. That is, until they are joined by the man with a critical view of their lives.
2046
In one of the most unconventional Christmas movies in the Criterion Collection, Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 is a bizarre foray into the science-fiction/romance genre. And while it is not as beloved as some of his other films, Wong Kar-wai mastered his elliptical storytelling and the pain of nostalgia in 2046.
The Chinese director is known for his movies that depict the navigation of life, as well as his sensual shot selections that portray the subtleties of existence. 2046 begins on the eve of Christmas and spans multiple years, following the passionate affairs of the womanizing sci-fi writer, Chow. Women enter and exit Chow’s life, and he takes inspiration from each of them, eventually blending reality with fiction.
Black Christmas
Before directing beloved family classic, A Christmas Story, filmmaker Bob Clark made a very different kind of holiday movie with Black Christmas. The 1974 movie is a precursor to the slasher genre, following a group of sorority sisters who are picked off by a mysterious killer over their winter break.
Clark creates a tense atmosphere in which the stranger who makes disturbing calls to the sorority house is just one of the serious problems that these young women deal with. The unsettling tone continues through the disturbingly ambiguous ending, keeping the characters and the audience on edge until next Christmas.
