Every holiday season, certain movies get cheered on by people who would secretly rather watch anything else. Here are 15 movies everyone pretends to like around the holidays.
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15. The Christmas Chronicles (2018)
Kurt Russell shows up as Santa with a leather jacket and a guitar riff, and for about ten minutes The Christmas Chronicles feels like it might actually go somewhere weird. Then the sled chase starts and the plot settles into the same lost-kids-save-Christmas formula every streaming holiday movie leans on. Russell is clearly having fun, which is more than you can say for the script around him. Charisma can only carry a sleigh so far. | © Netflix
14. Four Christmases (2008)
Nobody actually asks for a movie about dodging their own parents on a holiday, yet Four Christmases builds its entire plot around that exact premise. Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon get dragged through four dysfunctional family stops in one day, and the jokes repeat almost as fast as the houses change. The cast includes Jon Voight, Robert Duvall, and Sissy Spacek, all visibly better than the material they signed up for. Star power does not fix a script running on fumes. | © Warner Bros.
13. The Santa Clause (1994)
A man accidentally kills Santa, puts on the suit, and starts physically transforming into him against his will. That is the actual plot of The Santa Clause, and the movie treats it like a cute inconvenience instead of body horror. Tim Allen plays it light and breezy, but the premise gets stranger the longer you sit with it. Kids laughed. Parents quietly wondered what they just signed up for. | © Walt Disney Pictures
12. White Christmas (1954)
Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye carry White Christmas through one elaborate musical number after another, and the songs are doing most of the heavy lifting here. Strip away the Irving Berlin score and what is left is a thin plot about saving an old general's failing inn. The pacing drags between numbers in a way the Technicolor spectacle cannot quite cover up. People return for the songs, not the story. | © Paramount Pictures
11. Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
A courtroom trial to determine whether a department store Santa is the real deal sounds like a fun premise for about twenty minutes. Miracle on 34th Street stretches that same idea across a full runtime, and the legal back and forth slows everything to a crawl. Edmund Gwenn won an Oscar for the role, and it is easy to see why critics loved the sincerity even as the pacing wears thin. Good intentions do not always move quickly. | © 20th Century Fox
10. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Three hours feels generous for a film people claim to watch every single year. It's a Wonderful Life spends most of its runtime building toward a crisis that does not arrive until the final twenty minutes. Getting there means sitting through small town melodrama that moves at the pace of an actual Christmas Eve. The ending earns its reputation, but plenty of viewers fall asleep before they reach it. | © RKO Radio Pictures
9. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)
Clark Griswold ties his whole personality to throwing the perfect family Christmas, and the movie mines that obsession for every bit of chaos it can find. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation repeats the same formula over and over: Clark has a plan, the plan fails, something explodes or catches fire. The squirrel in the tree and the flaming sled run are the moments people actually remember. Everything between them is filler dressed up as tradition. | © Warner Bros.
8. The Grinch (2000)
Whoville was never built to survive this much makeup and prosthetics. The Grinch hands Jim Carrey a character designed for restraint, then lets him ignore that memo completely. The manic energy swallows Dr. Seuss's simple little fable whole, leaving almost nothing of the original underneath. Kids loved it, parents left the theater with headaches. | © Universal Pictures
7. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)
Kevin McCallister gets separated from his family for the second time in two years, and nobody in this franchise seems alarmed by that pattern. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York swaps the suburban house for a hotel and cranks the booby traps up to cartoon levels. Bricks, blowtorches, and a staple gun do damage that would hospitalize actual burglars. It works as slapstick but only because nobody involved thinks too hard about it. | © 20th Century Fox
6. The Family Stone (2005)
Walking into the Stone family's living room means walking into years of inside jokes aimed at the one outsider in the room. The Family Stone frames that pile-on as charming, even as Sarah Jessica Parker's character gets mocked for things she never had a chance to know. The film wants her humiliation to read as funny family dynamics. It plays less like comedy and more like watching someone get cornered at a party. | © 20th Century Fox
5. A Christmas Story (1983)
Leg lamps and BB guns made A Christmas Story a cable staple, but the jokes rarely change on rewatch. Ralphie narrates every minor inconvenience like it is a national emergency. The pacing drags between the handful of scenes people actually remember, the tongue on the pole, the bunny suit. Twenty-four hours of looping it on TV doesn't make the middle stretch move any faster. | © MGM
4. Elf (2003)
Buddy the Elf never stops yelling his own name, and somewhere around the fortieth syrup spaghetti joke, the bit stops landing. Will Ferrell commits fully, which is both the appeal and the problem. The man-child-in-New-York premise runs out of new angles fast, leaving repetition to do the heavy lifting. Watching it once a year still feels like one viewing too many for a lot of people. | © New Line Cinema
3. The Holiday (2006)
Two women swap houses, swap problems, and somehow land exactly where everyone in the theater guessed from the trailer. The Holiday coasts on Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz being likable in expensive sweaters. The romances resolve themselves with almost no real conflict standing in the way. Cozy lighting covers for a script that never risks surprising anybody. | © Sony Pictures
2. The Polar Express (2004)
A train ride to the North Pole should feel magical, not like staring into the eyes of something that used to be human. The motion-capture animation in The Polar Express aged into one of the more unsettling choices a kids movie has ever made. Tom Hanks plays several characters, and each one lands somewhere between charming and deeply wrong. Kids fell asleep before the sleigh bells, and plenty of adults understood why. | © Warner Bros.
1. Love Actually (2003)
Andrew Lincoln holding up cue cards outside his best friend's house gets replayed every December like it's romantic instead of alarming. Love Actually stitches together a dozen storylines, and at least half of them involve someone pursuing a person who never asked to be pursued. The boss chasing his secretary, the prime minister fixating on his assistant, it all gets framed as sweet. Christmas lights and a good soundtrack can dress up a lot of questionable behavior. | © Universal PicturesEvery holiday season, certain movies get cheered on by people who would secretly rather watch anything else. Here are 15 movies everyone pretends to like around the holidays.
