While the festive season brings perennial favourites like It's a Wonderful Life and Love Actually to our screens, a treasure trove of lesser-known Christmas films remains in the shadows. Writers from The Guardian have shared their personal picks for the most underrated holiday movies, offering a fresh and eclectic guide to seasonal viewing beyond the usual classics.
Vintage Charm and Social Conscience
The search for authentic festive spirit often leads back to the 1940s, a time before the holiday movie became a rigid genre. Jesse Hassenger champions It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947), a warm-hearted comedy with a clever premise. The film follows a cheerful vagrant, Aloysius T. McKeever (Victor Moore), who annually takes up residence in a vacant Fifth Avenue mansion. He soon invites a veteran, his friends, and a runaway girl—secretly the mansion owner's daughter—to share the space, leading to a delightful found-family narrative set against a Christmas and New Year backdrop. Director Roy Del Ruth blends class-conscious commentary on housing with romantic fairy-tale elements, creating a film that feels genuinely heartfelt.
Frank Capra's legacy isn't limited to Bedford Falls. Alaina Demopoulos highlights Meet John Doe (1941), where Gary Cooper plays the titular 'forgotten man' recruited by a reporter (Barbara Stanwyck) to front a fabricated protest movement. The film evolves into a Capra-esque tale of grassroots goodwill exploited by a wealthy publisher, offering a skewering of the ultra-rich that remains strikingly relevant and ends on an uplifting, festive note.
Festive Thrills and Animated Miracles
For those who prefer their Christmas chillier, Benjamin Lee recommends the 1978 thriller The Silent Partner. In a twist on festive crime, a wonderfully vile Christopher Plummer plays a criminal Santa whose bank heist is foiled by an opportunistic teller (Elliott Gould). Written by a young Curtis Hanson, it's a stylish, nasty, and unpredictable cat-and-mouse game that was hailed as a 'miracle' by critic Roger Ebert upon its overlooked release.
Animation offers one of the most poignant picks. Tammy Tarng praises Satoshi Kon's 2003 anime Tokyo Godfathers, a film inspired by the John Wayne western Three Godfathers. On Christmas Eve in Tokyo, three homeless people—an alcoholic, a transgender woman, and a runaway teen—find an abandoned baby and embark on a quest to find her parents. The journey is a dark, rollicking, and deeply moving exploration of coincidence and redemption, celebrating the possibility of Christmas miracles without sentimentality.
Comedy, Chaos, and Cult Classics
The holiday family gathering gets a riotous treatment in Almost Christmas (2016), as selected by Andrew Lawrence. Featuring a stellar cast including Danny Glover and Mo'Nique, the film mines comedy from five days of dysfunctional family tension, culminating in a chaotic Christmas dinner where a side chick's arrival leads to gunfire. It's a messy, heartfelt hoot that delivers festive resolution.
From the archives, Andrew Pulver resurrects the 1985 teen comedy Better Off Dead, starring John Cusack in his smirking prime. After being dumped at Christmas, Lane Myers decides to win back his girlfriend by skiing down a deadly slope. Packed with surreal 80s humour and quotable dialogue, it's a cult classic where festive cheer is incidental but undeniably present.
Finally, Radheyan Simonpillai points to Preston Sturges's 1944 masterpiece, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. This cheeky, bawdy wartime comedy follows Betty Hutton's Trudy Kockenlocker, who wakes up pregnant after a drunken night out but can't remember the father. With Eddie Bracken as the devoted simp willing to step in, Sturges crafts a hilarious and surprisingly touching refashioning of the nativity story, proving that Christmas movies can be subversive and joyful in equal measure.
This curated list proves that the festive film canon is far richer and more diverse than the usual streaming carousel suggests. Whether you're in the mood for social realism, animated adventure, dark thrills, or outright farce, there's an underrated Christmas movie waiting to be discovered.
