It’s become one of the traditions of the modern festive period: arguing about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The explosive 1988 film features, you may recall, a vest-clad Bruce Willis confounding Alan Rickman and his terrorist cohorts’ evil plans in a Los Angeles skyscraper on Christmas Eve – and it’s peppered throughout with fir trees and tinsel.
Some claim this means it should take its place as a festive staple alongside more conventional classics of the season, It’s a Wonderful Life et al. Opponents furiously insist that a proper Christmas film shouldn’t feature machine guns and explosions, but instead depict rather more heartwarming scenes.
Surely the solution is to acknowledge that both views have some merit – but to move on by creating a new, separate category to describe films which prominently feature Christmas but aren’t particularly Christmassy, films which find their main focus elsewhere: ‘Christmas-adjacent movies’, as it were.
Looking into Christmas alternatives gives you a whole new lease of life in terms of festive viewing that remains relevant to the season but actually offers the chance of a half decent film – as, let’s face it, most out-and-out Christmas films are pretty dire. I’d suggest a dip into any of the following:
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn play Henry II of England and his estranged wife Eleanor of Aquitaine spending Christmas 1183 together in a castle in the Loire. But, as can happen when families get together in this way, they soon find they are getting on each others’ nerves, perhaps understandably as he’s only just released her from a dungeon. They spend the holiday period plotting which of their sons shall succeed him. It’s terrific looking with great performances – Hepburn won an Oscar.
Elle (2016)
It’s all wintry gorgeousness in well-heeled, fairy-lit Paris at Christmas time – until the arrival of a sinister man in a ski mask, at which point it gets very dark, very quickly. What follows is part thriller, part social comedy. Isabelle Huppert is brilliant in this surprisingly complex and thoughtful piece from Paul Verhoeven, who is best known for the somewhat less nuanced Basic Instinct.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
This assembles some of the standard components of a cosy Christmas film: New York in winter, a young couple in love… but then instead of celebrating the arrival of the baby Jesus we get the son of Satan. That’s not very Christmassy, to use the celebrated line from Peep Show. A horror classic that contains many more Christmas trappings than you may recall.
Lady and the Tramp (1955)
I’ve never understood why this Disney offering isn’t filed as a Christmas film. It opens on Christmas Eve – when Lady, a spaniel puppy, is given as a Christmas gift. And although there are plenty of adventures and scrapes in between as the two titular characters fall in love, it then ends – happily, naturally – on another Christmas. It’s quite lovely, particularly those festive scenes that bookend it.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
Two beautiful young people in the Normandy port town fall in love but, through a series of misadventures and bad choices, don’t end up happy ever after – and sing about it. It’s not remotely Christmassy until the climactic scenes, when suddenly it’s very Christmassy indeed: there’s a tree being decorated, there’s snow, there’s sentiment. Peak period French 1960s chic with Catherine Deneuve too.
Babylon (1980)
Not to be confused with Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie’s big number of the same name about the golden age of Hollywood which comes out today, this is a much, much grittier affair. Shot on the mean streets of Brixton, Camberwell and the West End of that long-vanished dilapidated London of the late 1970s, it’s about young, first-generation black Britons of West Indian parentage and their tribulations. All sound systems, knackered old vans and reggae. It feels like a missing episode of Steve McQueen’s lauded 2020 series Small Axe.
Carol (2015)
Rooney Mara is an ingenue working in a New York department store over Christmas 1952 – where she meets a customer, Cate Blanchett’s Carol, an older, more worldly and wealthy divorcee who gradually draws her into her strange and slightly sinister world. It’s based on Patricia Highsmith’s least crime-driven story – for once, no one is murdered – but it still has plenty of quiet menace, and some wonderful Christmas touches too.
Tangerine (2015)
Transgender sex workers streetwalking in a particularly seedy Los Angeles is hardly the starting point for your typical Christmas film. Yet this rates above It’s a Wonderful Life and, indeed, is the most popular Christmas film of the century so far on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. This is because it’s dynamic, powerful, very funny and ultimately touching too. Not bad for a very low-budget film shot on iPhones. A modern cult classic.
Wake in Fright (1971)
What’s Christmas like in Australia where it’s summertime? If this Aussie new wave landmark is anything to go by it’s horrifying and grotesque. A teacher spends the festive holiday in an outback town where everyone is seemingly drunk, insane or often both. The kangaroo hunt is one of the most disturbing things you’ll ever see. Love Actually it ain’t.
Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969)
From the Australian new wave to the French: Éric Rohmer’s best-known film is shot in trademark black and white of the nouvelle vague which particularly suits the snowy landscapes in and around the city of Clermont-Ferrand. A man meets a woman at Christmas time and they drink and smoke and talk a good deal – and finally share a bed. But do they sleep together? As with all Rohmer’s work not much substantive ever happens but it’s a delicate, atmospheric will-they-won’t-they sort-of rom com. Rohmer revisited Christmas again in his A Winter’s Tale three decades later and it’s also well worth a look.
Diner (1982)
A nostalgic evocation of the friendships between a group of young people, Mickey Rourke and Ellen Barkin among them, finding their way into adulthood, set in a 1950s Baltimore characterised by big-finned Cadillacs and rock ‘n’ roll 45s. The story begins as the only one of their group to leave town to study comes home for the holidays and it unfolds as Christmas itself does. Among its festive scenes is a drunken Kevin Bacon destroying the nativity scene outside a church.
The Glenn Miller Story (1954)
This has peak period James Stewart lifting what could be a slightly plodding biopic – the life and abrupt death of the jazz age band leader – into one of the better films of the 1950s. There are some slightly unconvincing scenes of second world war England but the technicolour Christmas scenes are a joy. The soundtrack isn’t bad either.
Boiling Point (2022)
This was released in early January this year – but it’s very much a Christmas film. The chef patron at a fashionable London restaurant on one of those very, very busy December nights is wobbling like a well-made panna cotta. And as the stress ramps up, his addictions surface and it starts to become a white powder Christmas. Possibly the increasingly ubiquitous Stephen Graham’s finest hour yet while the single-take production is a bold move that works in spades to deliver intensity.
The Gold Rush (1925)
Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp becomes a gold prospector in the snowy wastes of Alaska where he experiences all manner of privations – at one point he’s so hungry he attempts to eat his own boot – in a series of superbly done comic vignettes. As well as the almost continuous whiteout there are extensive scenes of December festivity and contrasting heartbreak.
The Worst Person in the World (2021)
This Norwegian number won plaudits for injecting a bit of both invention and grit into the somewhat tired rom com genre. The most memorable scene is a world-stands-still sequence which is terrific fun. As are the psychedelic shrooms. There’s also snow and scenes of Nordic Christmas.
Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg brought a fresh touch to screen versions of Thomas Hardy. This pairs Matthias Schoenaerts as the tragic farmer Gabriel Oak with Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene. The story culminates in a Christmas Eve party with a Victorian Dorset Christmas rendered deliciously – even if everything does go predictably wrong.
Starter for Ten (2006)
A rom com spun around the perhaps unlikely premise of lovelorn students competing on University Challenge – coincidentally the US version of the show also appears in Diner. But also, like countless other rom coms, it has Christmas embedded in it. James McAvoy has his head turned by Alice Eve without initially realising the subtler merits of Rebecca Hall.
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