Christmas is a time for giving – and spending lots of time on the couch watching and eating your favourite festive treats.
Everyone has their favourite Christmas movie – but data can provide a stressfree solution to picking out a proper classic to please the whole family.
We’ve ranked the best Christmas movies of all time using audience and critic scores taken from the movie aggregator websites Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB.
Top of the tree will come as no surprise to many – as it is a festive classic dating back to 1946 which scored highly with critics and audiences across both platforms.
Jimmy Stewart’s iconic role as a failed businessman who wishes he had never been born doesn’t scream Christmas spirit at first glance.
But the intervention of his guardian angel ensured It’s A Wonderful Life became a timeless and heart warming Christmas classic that is still thrilling audiences today.
Rotten Tomatoes says the movie is “the holiday classic to define all holiday classics” and “one of a handful of films worth an annual viewing”.
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The film was rated 94 per cent “fresh” by critics and 95 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, and achieved a score of 8.6 out of 10 on IMDB – and that’s the highest aggregate rating across both platforms.
Next in the rankings is beautifully hand-drawn feature-length animation Klaus, released in 2019, which tells the story of a postman who befriends a reclusive toymaker.
Third on the list is The Holdovers, which was only released in January in the UK. It stars Paul Giamatti as a curmudgeonly teacher forced to babysit a handful of students over the Christmas break. He forms an unlikely bond with a brainy but damaged troublemaker and the school’s cook in a movie Rotten Tomatoes described as a “thought provoking dramedy for viewers seeking a dialogue-driven movie with a throwback feel”.
Other movies making up the top 10 include the Jimmy Stewart romance The Shop Around The Corner, Bruce Willis’s classic Christmas action flick Die Hard, the Jack Lemmon and Shirly MacLaine comedy The Apartment, and Tim Burton’s animated musical fantasy, The Nightmare Before Christmas.
You can use our interactive gadget to pick a Christmas movie to watch. Simply check the ratings, or choose a genre, actor, or decade and pick out the best options depending on whether you want to see a Christmas-themed action movie to rival Die Hard, a rom-com more engaging than Love Actually, or a family film better than Elf.
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