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A Grand Day Out (1998)

Way before the feature-length Wallace and Gromit films of more recent decades, my family would tune in each Christmas to the BBC reruns of Aardman’s original 1980s and 90s claymation classics. Today, the cosy, tea-and-toast-on-the-sofa feeling of them still perfectly encapsulates the festive season for me. My favourite is the first, A Grand Day Out, which despite running for under 25 minutes somehow fits in piles of exuberant storytelling. After all, why shouldn’t you build a rocket to fly to the moon for cheese if you happened to find your cupboard bare of it? And surely few moments in film history (or Christmas film history, at least) can compare to Wallace’s dramatic last-minute realisation during the countdown to lift-off: “No crackers, Gromit! We’ve forgotten the crackers!” (Jocelyn Timperley)

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The Holdovers (2023) 

“You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?” is the line of dialogue that epitomises the quiet poignance of Alexander Payne’s recent festive classic. At a snowy, all-boys boarding school in early-1970s New England, grouchy classics teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) stays over the winter holidays to supervise one frustrated student abandoned by his parents, Angus Tulley (Dominic Sessa), with newly bereaved head cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) for company. As the unlikely trio gain a deeper understanding of one another, they begin to find pockets of joy in each other’s company – particularly after a trip to Boston, which leads to clouds of self-doubt clearing. With sparkles of sharp wit and hope, and a perfect soundtrack featuring the likes of Labi Siffre and Shocking Blue, The Holdovers is as much a comforting Christmas film as a moving coming-of-age story. (Molly Gorman)

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Live Flesh (1997)

Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh opens and closes with two unexpected nativity scenes, between which there are 25 years and a lot of drugs, sex and violence. A close-up of the star of Bethlehem from the Madrid Christmas lights opens the film. We then hear the screams of a young sex worker (Penélope Cruz), who is having a baby on a public bus with the help of her madame (Pilar Bardem). The scene, an ingenious mix of drama and comedy, hints at what’s going to come in the film – and beyond. Years later, Cruz referred to that scene as a “rehearsal for life”, as Bardem (Javier Bardem’s mother) would become grandmother to Cruz’s children. Live Flesh also marked Almodóvar’s departure from high camp melodramas towards a more mature, darker and often sourer cinema. It’s a film about love, death, birth, longing, and redemption, sandwiched between two scenes showing the Christmases of its outcast characters. And it is, perhaps, a prelude to the Spanish master’s upcoming film: Bitter Christmas. (Javier Hirschfeld)

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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) 

If you’re looking to watch a Harry Potter film over the festive period, any of them is likely to fill you with those warm, nostalgic feels. But Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban might take the biscuit (or should it be chocolate frog?) for one particularly Christmassy scene in Hogsmeade involving a snowball fight and, naturally, an invisibility cloak. Are there themes of death and revenge? You can bet your galleons on it. But there are also great banqueting halls packed with elaborately prepared food, and fantastic performances from the likes of Gary Oldman, Timothy Spall and David Thewlis. With Alfonso Cuarón directing, the third instalment of the franchise gets darker as the three main characters grow out of childhood. But then, the best Christmas stories always have a dash of darkness in their cauldrons. And who needs Santa’s sleigh when you’ve got the opening “Knight Bus” sequence, one of the most memorable in the Potter universe? (Cal Byrne)

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Young Frankenstein (1974)

My family used to spend the holidays in the Dolomites, in a small apartment on the ground floor of a house by the woods. After a day on the slopes, we would ski back home through the pines, jumping over a narrow stream. Our living room was full – friends and family sitting on the sofa, around the table, and on the rug. Young Frankenstein was on TV: in Italy, they would run Mel Brooks’s horror homage every Christmas. It was inexplicably renamed Frankenstein Jr, and dubbed in Italian. Nonsensical translations of lines like “Werewolf? There wolf!” made it even sillier. Other jokes didn’t need words: the movable hump, Igor’s eye, Frau Blücher’s horses. We’d eat panettone, tangerines, chocolate, and nougat. If I wasn’t alert, my brother would throw his fetid ski socks in my face. I would retaliate later, squeezing a tangerine peel in his eye. I believe that Young Frankenstein is Christmas for me because it’s pure fun and mischief – like childhood. (Anna Bressanin)

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