Séamas O'Reilly: Five proper Christmas films to get past the holiday-movie deluge

Bruce Willis, in Die Hard: an actual Christmas film for actual Christmas people, says Séamas O'Reilly

A glance through the Hallmark Channel’s 2023 listings reveals that the market for Christmas movies is not so much booming, as continuing to blow up in a chain of controlled explosions.

This year, 42 brand new festive films will join the 38 it released in 2022 and the 40 it tallied in both 2021 and 2020. And that’s just Hallmark. 

Last year, Entertainment Weekly listed 172 new Christmas movies across all platforms. Extrapolating this backwards in time, it’s likely that around 700 Christmas movies have been produced and released since December 2020.

Almost all traffic in the same tone and themes, and at least half involve the same exact plot (hard-headed beauty returns from big city job to find love in small hometown). 

They typically star one or two forgotten actors of yesteryear, so that reading their cast-lists produces that same “oh, that’s where they’ve ended up” vibe, known to anyone who read the Galatasaray line-up before a Champions League game.

My favourite aspect of this phenomenon is the movies’ titles. Clearly, the hateful churn of making 700 films in four years makes it prohibitively difficult to name them anything original, so the results are now uniformly, and jarringly, bleak exercises in blank description. 

It says a lot about the dregs on offer that my heart cheered at the breezy contrivance of Never Been Chris’d, but such bright spots are in the minority. 

Most sound like government-made substitutes designed for those in recovery for addictions to actual Christmas movies. 

Titles like Christmas By Design, A World Record Christmas and Friends & Family Christmas sound a starkly utilitarian tone, evoking all the cheery personality of an electrical box splattered with tinsel. 

See also: the deadeningly loveless whiff of Our Christmas Mural and Navigating Christmas, or the vaporous, placeholder quality to My Norwegian Holiday or Round and Round. 

Of course, none of those even come close to my personal favourite; the harrowingly anodyne Time for Her to Come Home for Christmas, a title so prosaically constructed, so spitefully denuded of charm, that it approaches the realm of outsider art.

These, we must assume, are calorie-free detritus for only the most abject and wretched Christmas Movie fiends; the kind of films which, were they purchased in a shop, would be bought without a word passing between you and the cashier, and popped in a brown paper bag for your discretion as you exited.

But we need not content ourselves with the pulped offal on offer each year, not when there are already so many less heralded movies hiding in plain sight. 

I hereby recommend some films which you might not even realise are Christmas movies, but which very much are — so long as you’re willing to approach the task of watching them with a little more imagination than will go into naming The Woman Who Had A Very Nice Christmas Back Home (2025).

Die Hard II (1990)

Ha! You thought I was going to say Die Hard, but I am too smart to fall into the most tedious film discussion on Earth. 

No, I said its sequel, a much, much worse film which does, however, take place at the exact same time of year. Die Hard II asks “what if Die Hard, but in an airport?”. 

It also asks “What if Bruce Willis was already tired of making these films?” but remains an eminently watchable bit of potboiler action, which includes snow and gifts and the series’ trademark note of tension: that single, discordant jingle bell that intrudes on the soundtrack any time John McClane realises something. 

It also features Colm Meaney as a doomed British pilot, a corpse having its fingerprints taken by fax, and a jumbo jet exploding in the days before CGI so you know they actually did it in real life. 

It suffers from comparison to the original, but then so does Citizen Kane, so we can forgive it.

The Thing (1982)

It would be easier to retcon this as a Christmas movie just because of all the snow, beards and woollens, or its central arc of visitors from a distant land bearing gifts. 

But it really makes the cut for its astute encapsulation of the true horror of Christmas; the gnawing misery of being trapped indoors with people you neither like nor trust.

Gremlins (1984)

All the events in Joe Dante’s seminal comedy horror take place on Christmas Eve, and Phoebe Cates’ character even has an entire arc centred on her dislike for the season, which wouldn’t be out of place in the Hallmark canon.

Granted, her lack of cheer has less to do with being a big-city lawyer who’s forgotten her small-town roots, and more to do with the fact that her father died while attempting to come down the chimney dressed as Santa Claus, but we must resist the urge to split hairs. 

Why settle for the Gifts of the Magi, when you can gift yourself a mogwai instead?

In Bruges (2008)

If you haven’t seen this film in a while, it’s likely a little wordier and more annoying than you remember, but its cosy atmosphere of dim lighting, drink, and murderous retribution, all set in a picture-postcard slice of fairy tale Northern Europe, likely make it more festive too.

Catch Me If You Can (2002)

Steven Spielberg’s comedy-drama is a masterpiece in zippy crime storytelling, and also features one of the more bleak ruminations on the holiday season ever committed to film; when Leonardo di Caprio’s elusive con man begins the tradition of calling his long-time pursuer, Tom Hanks, on Christmas Day, leading the latter to realise his quarry has no one else to call.

The gently aching nature of their festive phonecalls serves as emotional counterpart to the film’s antic charm, culminating in the film’s festive denouement, set within a snowy town in rural France you could well imagine showing up in a Hallmark movie anyway. 

I guess I’ll have to watch Catch Me If You Claus (2023) this week, to see if they did as good a job.