Photo: Lucy Corry / RNZ
Watching a movie with a festive theme is a crucial part of the holiday season. It's that most wonderful time of the year, where all sorts of indulgences are, well, indulged. For me, that includes lots of movie watching.
Hopefully this list will help you decide on some new favourites (and avoid the inevitable nightly bickering over the remote, which is not in the spirit of the season).
1. For computer-animation fans: Arthur Christmas (2011)
This Aardman comedy is part of our family's Christmas Eve ritual. We've seen it so often that the entire script is etched into our brains, but we still laugh like drains at almost every line. Like a North Pole Succession, Malcolm Claus (Jim Broadbent) decides to stay on for another year rather than hand over the reins to eldest child Steve (Hugh Laurie) and a tragically undelivered present prompts youngest son Arthur (James McAvoy) and oldest Claus Grandsanta (Bill Nighy) to go on a globetrotting mission to save Christmas. It's perfectly cast, as you can probably tell, but the MVP here is the script by Peter Baynham (Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa).
Digital rental from Apple ($2.99) or Neon ($5.99)
2. For hand-drawn animation fans: A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
It was a toss-up between this beloved American tradition and a British one, Raymond Briggs' The Snowman. Seeing as the latter is not available on any streamers or rental sites, Peanuts wins. Remastered in 4K by Apple, this looks fantastic while still staying true to its sixties roots. If Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack isn't a fixture in your Christmas playlists then you're missing a trick.
Streaming on AppleTV+
3. For Christmas rom-com fans: About a Boy (2002)
Listless rich boy Hugh Grant, sustained by the royalties on a Christmas hit that his father wrote back in the day, decides to spice up his love life a bit by pretending to be a single parent. He joins a support group through which he meets Fiona (Toni Collette) and her son Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), and profound life-changing experiences happen to all of them. Just about perfect.
Digital Rental from Apple ($2.99)
4. For classic Christmas film fans: Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
The standard answer here is It's a Wonderful Life but I prefer this, largely because I haven't seen it as often. All the best Christmas films have a mix of emotions and there's joy and poignancy in this, aided by some great songs and Judy Garland's performance for the ages. The late Bill Gosden, former director of the New Zealand International Film Festival, told me once that this was his favourite film of all time.
Digital rental from Apple ($2.99) or AroVision ($5.99)
5. For horror fans: Krampus (2015)
Nowadays, Christmas horror films seem to start from a punny title and work their way up from there - It's a Wonderful Knife (2023) and Violent Night (2022) are two recent examples. But I've plumped for a recent monster film based on a terrifying character from European folklore. Why? For the entirely arbitrary reason that it was shot in Wellington and features a cameo from the Petone Mitre10 Mega store.
Digital rental from Apple ($2.99)
6. For Christmas Special fans: A Very Murray Christmas (2015)
These are usually called 'holiday' specials in the US, as they are designed to cover everything from Hannukah to Kwanzaa. There are some legendary examples: The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) was so amazingly bad that there is even a new documentary about it. Last year The Guardians of the Galaxy got in on the act with a lacklustre story about Drax (Dave Bautista) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) kidnapping Kevin Bacon as a present for Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) because Footloose is his favourite film. Better, then, to go with this Emmy-nominated celebrity-studded extravaganza directed by Sofia Coppola.
Streaming on Netflix
7. For family movie fans: The Lion in Winter (1968)
It's criminal that this 12th-century family reunion is so difficult to find because it is a richly entertaining confection, full of barbed wit that gives great actors plenty to get their teeth into. Henry II (Peter O'Toole) has allowed his estranged wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn, in an Oscar-winning performance) out of prison so she can join the family for Christmas. He needs her to agree that their youngest son, John (Nigel Terry) become his heir instead of Richard the Lionheart (Anthony Hopkins). She is not in favour of this arrangement and sparks fly.
DVD rental from Aro St Video (Wellington) or Alice in Videoland (Christchurch)
8. For franchise fans: Hawkeye (2021)
One of the better Marvel TV spinoffs, this sees Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) trapped in New York with a teenage fan (Hailee Steinfield) who has stumbled on a plot to reveal his identity as the mysterious assassin Ronin. All he wants to do is get home to spend Christmas with his family but at every step the conspiracy goes deeper and deeper. This show is also the introduction of the very funny Rogers: The Musical, a Broadway biography of Captain America.
Streaming on Disney+
9. For arthouse fans: Carol (2015)
The doomed relationship between Therese (Rooney Mara) and Carol (Cate Blanchett) takes place over a holiday period in 1952 New York. Carol meets Therese at a department store where she is buying Christmas presents and deliberately leaves her gloves behind so they have an excuse to meet again. Family and society conspire against this affair, though, and Todd Haynes' film is a beautiful and heart-breaking portrait of a love that can only be fulfilled by demolishing everything else.
Streaming on Netflix
10. For action fans: Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (2005)
The obvious choice in this category is Die Hard (or even Die Hard 2 which is also a Christmas movie) but I direct your attention to this picture which restarted the careers of both Robert Downey Jr. and screenwriter and director Shane Black. Downey Jr. plays a thief who gets mistaken for a method actor and is paired with a private detective (Val Kilmer) to do research for a role. They stumble on a real murder and then get drawn further and further in. There is some debate about whether this is a real Christmas movie but it has all the trappings and Black does like setting his films during the holiday season: Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Iron Man 3.
Digital rental from Apple ($2.99)
11. For religious movie fans: The Nativity Story (2006)
The bubba from Bethlehem being the reason for the season, it would be remiss of me to ignore the religious aspects of the holiday completely. This version gets the tick mainly because of the presence of our own Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider) as the Virgin Mary. It also stars Oscar Isaac and is directed by Catherine Hardwicke who went on to make the first Twilight film.
Digital purchase from Apple ($14.99)
12. For fans of the badly-behaved: The Ice Harvest (2005)
Bad Santa isn't the only movie in which Billy Bob Thornton gets up to mischief at Christmas time. In this one, he's a strip-club owner who, with his crooked lawyer (John Cusack), has stolen $2 million from the local mob in Wichita, Kansas. Unable to make their escape because of the frozen roads, they are stuck trying to evade the thugs who are on their trail, keep their ill-gotten gains out of each other's frosty mitts and try and celebrate Christmas at the same time.
Digital rental from Apple ($2.99)