The 12 films of Christmas: filmmakers on their festive favourites

What’s your favourite Christmas film? Chances are, it’s something you first saw as a child – in the cinema, on TV, or it was given to you in VHS or DVD form – and also something you’ve been watching year after year in the decades since. The Christmas film is a special kind of comfort movie, brought down from the attic with the tinsel and trinkets for the (ever-expanding) festive season and subjected to more repeat viewings than most films can stand up to. 

The warm, safe glow of familiarity is part of any holiday’s charm, as we seek respite from real-world turbulence and settle into traditions which remind us that some things do stay the same. Watching Home Alone (1990) or Holiday Inn (1942) for the 20th time might not reveal anything new to us about the human condition (or even about the films themselves), but they soothe us with songs, with good humour, with memorable quotes. And, more significantly, they invariably end with a reminder of the importance of love and family – see also It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Elf (2003), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), every adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) and, yes, even Die Hard (1988). 

A new entry into the Yuletide movie corpus, Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point infuses the festive formula with a wistful and almost eerie mood, one that’s familiar from the director’s 2019 debut Ham on Rye. The new film’s opening dedication – “For the lost, may they find their way home on Christmas Eve” – could refer directly to its Balsano family, who are reuniting in 2006 for their annual get-together in Long Island, but it could also easily be a mantra for such movies as a whole, referring to the plights of George Bailey, Buddy the Elf, John McClane et al. An unprompted phrase from a local cop played by Gregg Turkington – “It’s Christmas Eve, the night of angels” – points even more directly at Bailey and his guardian angel Clarence. 

For its first half, Taormina’s film hunkers down in casa Balsano, an ordinary suburban house fit to burst with traditional food and drink – some family-specific, like Uncle Ray’s ‘salami sticks’ and the beloved cherry affogato – and tchotchkes accumulated over the generations. The family itself sprawls across the house’s three floors, breaking off into sub-groups, often sorted by age, before reconvening for dinner. What some know, and others don’t, is that the house has been sold and this will be their last Christmas Eve there. Taormina says the film is “based on a tradition that my family’s been doing for fifty years… it’s very much emotionally rooted in my experience, but not literally”. One aspect may be literally rooted in a Taormina family Christmas, though: they have a credit of ‘Set Decoration’. Like the Balsano house, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is full. Full of kids’ overexcitement, teenagers’ sarcastic remarks, parents’ askance glances to one another, grandparents’ happy exhaustion. Full of life.

Where the film begins to tinker with tradition is in its second half, when the Balsano teens abscond to join their friends at a local bagel shop for a low-stakes hangout, before sneaking some booze from a gas station and participating in woozily slow makeout sessions in the backseats of their cars – Ham on Rye territory. The friends’ optimistic promises to go to the same college and stay BFFs puncture the mood: we know all too well that these teens’ salad days will, like the Balsano family’s Christmas Eves, soon be over. This melancholy tone and a downbeat ending are what set Miller’s Point apart from the warm and fuzzy Christmas canon. Taormina says: “I think about how Bresson speaks of translations, where literal translations aren’t the truth, they’re not relevant, not responsible, they’re nothing. A translation has to be emotionally carrying what was said. That’s what this film is doing with my own traditions.” 

Melancholy is part of the emotional truth of Christmas, but it is all too often either ignored or overcome in festive films. It’s a Wonderful Life is about a man on the brink of suicide, but its final upwelling of community spirit is an overwhelming repudiation of Bailey’s previous point of view. And Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) may be about the Smith family’s grief over leaving their Missouri home for New York, but in contrast with Miller’s Point, where the die is cast – the house is already sold – St. Louis ends with the decision being overturned on Christmas Day. By letting us sit with sadness, by not undermining it, Miller’s Point gives a truer depiction of ‘the most wonderful time of the year’ than most other films. 

Perhaps a cinephile parent will start streaming Miller’s Point this year, and they and their children will return to it year after year, but the canonisation of a ‘Christmas classic’ seems to be becoming a rarer and rarer event. Just in the past five years we’ve been bombarded with festive films, primarily by streaming services eager to lock in the seasonal viewer base; Netflix alone has offered dozens, from the excellent (the animations Klaus, 2019, and Robin Robin, 2021) to the unfortunate (Lindsay Lohan amnesia comedy Falling for Christmas, 2022), with a handful more releasing this winter. (At time of writing – in mid-November – its sexy-snowman-turned-sexy-human romcom Hot Frosty is sitting at the top of the streamer’s charts.) Are we in an era of quantity over quality? 

If we look back once more to It’s a Wonderful Life, it took decades to find its audience. After failing to break even, it was ignored until the 1970s then, due to a misunderstanding of copyright, TV stations began to play the film every year, for free. This stopped in the 90s when the story writer’s estate enforced the law. But by then, it had found its fans and won the reputation as a classic it still holds 50 years later. Fifty years from now, maybe we’ll discover one of these films in our over-stuffed streaming stockings was the Christmas gift we didn’t know we needed.

• Chosen by Guillermo del Toro

It’s a Wonderful Life is one of my favourite movies for many reasons. I find it fascinating that Capra, an immigrant [from Italy], gave back America a view of itself that was more lovely and wholesome than it really was, and at the same time darker and more nightmarish than movies tended to imagine. Like Walt Disney, Capra is very often misinterpreted as an eternal optimist, but the nightmarish nature of the dark episodes in It’s a Wonderful Life demonstrate that he understands terror, that he understands darkness. 

It’s a nightmare that is adjacent to the American Dream, and to the American psyche. There’s always this creepier, darker, edgier side to the Norman Rockwell goodness. The hopefulness of the ending only exists in a contrast. 

To me it’s perfectly timed, in terms of comedic tone and deliver  and melodrama. It’s a movie that it would be impossible to go through without that final release. In a strange way, it’s the greatest ‘What if?’ speculative fiction. 

I first saw it as a kid on TV and every time I see it, it’s inevitably one of those movies that makes me cry three, four times. We watch it in the cinema every year around Christmas, and we watch it on TV at least another time, because it’s just impeccable. 

— Guillermo del Toro was speaking to Thomas Flew

• Chosen by Tyler Taormina

I watch probably ten to twenty Hallmark movies with my mom each year. They’re pretty good, they’re really weird. They have sort of a paradoxical effect, like any medication might, where sometimes I just love them and they put me in a great mood, and other times they severely depress me. 

There are about thirty [Hallmark Christmas movies, such as Three Wise Men and a Baby, 2022, Operation Nutcracker, To Have and To Holiday and ’Tis the Season to Be Irish, all 2024] made every year. Watching them feels like being filled with novocaine. After the holiday season ends, I say “Never again” and then sure enough, when the time comes, I go back home and my family is so excited to watch them together, especially my mom. She starts watching them now [early October]. She’s probably watching them right now on TV. 

The Hallmark films actually put a big emphasis on experience, doing fun things and going to interesting places, so there’s a tactility to them and they create a space for you to ‘be’ as a viewer. 

What’s interesting is they’re insanely formulaic, but actually, if watch enough of them you learn that there definitely is a skill to making them. It’s not as simple as following a formula. There’s a real art to them when they work and sometimes they feel surreal and dreamy. They’re false and sterile – yet happy – depictions of what mundane life is like. They’re a shining example of artifice.

— Tyler Taormina was speaking to Thomas Flew

• Chosen by Dea Kulumbegashvili

For me, Fanny and Alexander is about childhood and imagination. The last time I was with my family was two years ago and we watched the film over the course of two days. It really reminds me of my own childhood. I grew up in a big family during the civil war in Georgia and there was never any electricity, so we didn’t dream of becoming film directors – we knew mostly about theatre and literature. At Christmas, my sister and I used to put on a performance for the family, with big decorations, and we would create everything with our cousins. We had a big family and would go from one [household] to another, like on a tour. Everybody lived in the same town, but we would need to travel from my grandmother’s house to her brother’s houses, to their children’s houses. It was a huge deal for us. 

The grandmother in the film reminds me of my own grandmother, who raised all of us and is the matriarch of the family. Of course, we didn’t grow up in such beauty, because we grew up during very hard times, but I think the beauty of childhood is that how your family looks at hardship also changes how you perceive things. 

Fanny and Alexander is almost a perfect film, because it’s about everything. It’s masterful but also effortless at the same time. It allows you to connect emotionally on a very instinctive, universal level, because we all come from our childhood and know what it means to first encounter authority in life – especially punishing authority – because in our own ways we have been through certain things while growing up. It’s a film about the magic moments of childhood and how these moments are sometimes taken over by authority. For me, this was my school, which was very religious and very rigid – Georgia is still very religious, but [my childhood] was during the peak. Everybody was required to study Georgian Eastern Orthodox religion and it was the guiding subject at school; we studied everything through the prism of Christianity. 

This film very much reminds me of how imagination is formed as something almost inherent within us, within every human being. Maybe it disappears as we grow older, but when we’re children it’s just there and it usually flourishes. I was very lucky because I grew up in a family which supported its flourishing. This film always makes me think of this, of the most dear memories of my childhood. I hope that one day I’ll be able to make a film about childhood. That’s an ultimate dream for me.

— Dea Kulumbegashvili was speaking to Thomas Flew

• Chosen by Guy Maddin

I haven’t seen this astonishing film in decades, so my memories of this Yuletide hitman ultra-noir are extremely unreliable, but I’ll never forget its relentlessly cynical second-person narration! Second-person! “You were born, and then you screamed!” And, “You hate Christmas!” This movie never stops telling you what you feel! It’s a macabre effect, this narration. And yes, this flophouse-cheap independent really seems to hate Christmas, and you love it!

• Chosen by Steven Soderbergh

Stalag 17 is a great movie, and it’s not obvious. That’s my Christmas movie. 

I have very strong memories as a child. I got the movie bug from my dad. Every year he would rent a 16mm projector and a print of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T [1953] and we would watch that movie every Christmas. That’s part of what made me who I am as a filmmaker. I feel lucky to be born to my parents, because that’s a pretty obscure, odd film for a highly educated ex-marine to walk into and want to make part of the family history, but I’m really glad he did. It instilled in me an appreciation for things that are not down the middle. I’m actually due [a rewatch]. Stalag 17 and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, which came out in the same year, is a really good double-feature. 

— Steven Soderbergh was speaking to Philip Concannon

• Chosen by Luna Carmoon

When I think of Christmas, or December even, I’m drawn to the feeling that this time of year seeps with numinous divinity. I am often tethered to revisiting the same films I did as a teenager: Time of the Gypsies [1988], Breaking the Waves [1996], The Double Life of Veronique [1991]. I do think of film-watching as a seasonal activity, even if the seasons sit within a single day. It makes sense that Kieślowski is for winter, around 5.30pm, as too is Żuławski, but much later on in the day. Lumet is autumn, the [British] Woodfall films too, and Fassbinder also, but yet Chahine reeks of summer spells. Altman N’ Allison Anders in evenings, N’ the [Japanese] Sun Tribe films of afternoon sweats. But why do I watch At Close Range [1986] or Over the Edge [1979] on the last days of summer at 6.30pm, the same as I do with Gas Food Lodging [1992], as the sky moltens into its new pummelled blues? It’s a synesthesia of cinema N’ it plays with my life in senses. December is one of them months when this secret antenna heightens more, so I indulge in feeling through my own nostalgias for first experiencing these films. I probably should have picked The Tin Drum [1979] or The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-inthe- Moon Marigolds [1972] or The 14 [1973] to twin with Hoard’s [2023] synchronicities N’ odes, or even films that feel more liminal… 

However, a film I always revisit this time of year is Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke. I often think of it as encapsulating the essence of that week of limbo from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day. The boredom of a less liminal in-between but of a much more physical realm’s in-between, where you sit in your life in this stale state as another year of dread or hope beckons. Or at least trying to understand yourself in this short slot of given time, as if a bomb will go off if you don’t discover something revolutionary about yourself. This film comforts me in that feeling. It’s lyrical, hilarious, absurd, but also funnily human, which is how we are all reminded to feel, from our families, at this festive time, which the entirety of the film lives in. It mimics this with Ruth [Kate Winslet, above], who experiences that in her three-day cult deprogramming programme; she’s stuck in a state of ‘India syndrome’, coaxed back home by her anxious mother for a secret N’ timely family intervention to break her out of spiritual psychosis. They hire P.J. Waters [Harvey Keitel], himself also a previous cult exiter N’ specialist, to break her down and bring her back to reality. Unbeknownst to him, they will see through each other better than any Baba or other spiritual leader, and do this rebirthing in a bizarre turn of sexual events cracking like eggs until they thaw out, entering utter delirium N’ into reality. 

Christmas tinsel antlers wobble on car roofs, ‘Be Kind’ is lipsticked on foreheads, and as sky liquefies towards the end of a burnt orange once more into blue, with an Angelo Badalamenti score to match, it’s a special thing to experience this month, at around 4pm, and each year… I love it so.

• Chosen by Luca Guadagnino

What I will watch is The Godfather Part III. It’s the best of the three for me. Part II is too perfect and The Godfather is too legendary. But Part III has the ambition of a man who did everything and the fragility of the man who is going toward this older part of his work and his life. And it’s full of this longing melancholy. The scene where Diane Keaton listens to her son sing at the party in the villa, where she wanders in her mind and the movie cuts back to the past because it’s connecting both her and Pacino to their lost love, it’s so incredible. And it has parallels with one of the great movies I love, John Huston’s The Dead [1987]. 

It’s a wonderful movie. Coppola’s films that I love are this one and Peggy Sue Got Married [1986]. And Jack [1996] is one of his masterpieces. For me, a great director invisibly masters everything he does. In Jack, you feel the way in which he’s taking this kind of conventional story but bringing humanity, and the way in which the world is created. It’s so beautiful. 

But I come back to The Godfather Part III at that time of year because usually my Christmas is quite silent: we don’t have a big family, we are not a lot of people. It’s beautiful to have the silence of the winter and immerse yourself into that movie. I have time. No more phone calls, no work. It’s a long movie [2 hours, 42 minutes] and I want to dedicate myself to that. But do not watch the version that Coppola re-edited – watch the original 1990 version. It’s a masterpiece.

— Luca Guadagnino was speaking to Ryan Gilbey

• Chosen by Lucile Hadžihalilović

My ‘Christmas’ film would be the series Stille Nacht by the Quay Brothers. For its poetry, mystery, mix of wonders and fears that I associate with this period of the year. It’s a concentrate of surreal inventions with a unique mix of the profane and sacred, it’s inspired and inspiring. A marvellous Christmas gift for that special night.

• Chosen by Wes Anderson

It must have been a magnificently nostalgic experience to see Meet Me in St. Louis back in 1944. Now it’s magnificently exotic. Maybe the America it evokes only ever quite existed on the backlot of MGM, but, for myself, the characters and world of this movie come to life like they’re living next door across a little strip of lawn, snow-covered in the winter. All their minor/modest hopes and troubles feel crucial and captivating – and they sing! My favourite musical ever made.

• Chosen by Athina Rachel Tsangari

Nothing says holiday nostalgia to me more than A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first Peanuts special. It was heralded instantly as a classic though no one really knows why. It is the antithesis of a ‘holiday special’. A ‘holiday futility’ special, rather. And yet it has it all. First off, it has Charlie Brown, the legend. The prince of indecision and nihilism, though a romantic at heart. It has Snoopy, the world’s most contemplative dog. It has Lucy, the 20th century’s most famous psychoanalyst. Cheap, too. She charges only a nickel to get Charlie Brown out of his holiday agnosticism. It has one of the best dance sequences in the history of cinema. The most iconic tree in the history of Xmas trees. The Vince Guaraldi Trio lending a killer score, improvised live in three hours. It’s a children’s musical of sorts, voiced and sung by actual children – what a concept! All in all, a total banger.

• Chosen by Radu Jude

For many years, because of complicated personal issues, I hated Christmas. Now it is better – and it is a good time for work, so I am usually working as much as I can in that period. I watched Don’t Look Up [2021], because everybody was talking about it, and Gremlins [1984] by Joe Dante with my younger son last year because I read about it in a J. Hoberman book [Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, 2019]. Never saw it before. I loved it, so we also watched [Dante’s] Small Soldiers [1998] – a masterpiece. If I am allowed to recommend something, it would be Christmas on Earth by Barbara Rubin.

• Chosen by Alice Rohrwacher

My choice is Miracle in Milan – and Miracolo a Le Havre [the Italian title for Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, 2011]. Also, all films with the word ‘miracle’ in the title. For me they are two very important movies. 

What are miracles? We always imagine very big things when we think about miracles, but in Miracle in Milan the big miracles are somehow not so important – it’s the little miracles that are important, the ones that happen inside people. It’s a social fairytale. 

What is a Christmas movie? I was talking about this a lot with Alfonso Cuarón when we made Le pupille [a 2022 short, directed by Rohrwacher and produced by Cuarón], and in fact a Christmas movie is generally one with a moral. That doesn’t mean the moral has to be Catholic, or a good one, but it’s always a movie with a moral. You are in the story, but at the same time you keep a distance from the story to understand the moral. This, for me, is a Christmas movie. And when I think of a movie like this, it’s Miracle in Milan, where Vittorio De Sica, who is famous for his neorealism, tried to explore something very different: the fairytale. But we can see, inside this fairytale, that the object of his love is reality. I think I first saw [the film] during my first winter at university, not at home. We never watched Christmas movies traditionally as a family. I grew up in a family where the TV was not an object, not a focus in the centre of the family. I saw Miracle in Milan the first winter after I left home to study, in a De Sica retrospective. That really embedded me in cinema. 

I love to see this movie with people around me, which is another Christmas feeling. It’s not a movie I want to watch in private.

— Alice Rohrwacher was speaking to Isabel Stevens