Using audience and critic scores taken from the movie rating websites Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, we’ve ranked the best Christmas movies of all time – just in time for the big day.
Top of the tree 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.
According to Rotten Tomatoes, the movie is “the holiday classic to define all holiday classics” and “one of a handful of films worth an annual viewing”.
READ MORE: Cinema lists three main reasons Die Hard is a Christmas movie – and film fans agree
It was rated 94% “fresh” by critics and 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and achieved a score of 8.6 out of 10 on IMDB.
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.
But the data also reveals some movies you might want to avoid.
According to Rotten Tomatoes, Deck The Halls – the 2006 comedy starring Matthew Broderick and Danny Devito – was most hated by critics, while 2016’s Red Christmas, starring Dee Wallace as a mother trying to protect her family from a hideously deformed killer, was most disliked by audiences.
IMDB users, however, picked The Mean One, the 2022 horror about a Christmas-hating murderer in a Santa suit, as the worst rated seasonal film.
But when all the scores are combined, Deck The Halls shares the billing as the worst Christmas film with A Merry Friggin’ Christmas (2014), starring the late Robin Williams, which was disliked by audiences and critics alike.
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