Underrated or forgotten holiday movies you should watch this season

Henri-Georges Clouzot, the French Alfred Hitchcock, was best known for his wickedly cold-hearted thrillers. This film about an ambitious chanteuse, her jealous husband and the wealthy businessman who winds up dead after attempting to romance the singer plays out over Christmas but evinces little holiday cheer for most of its running time. But just when it looks like this is going to close out as a classic Clouzot mediation on the evil that people do, it surprises you with a hopeful denouement. It’s an unexpectedly warm Christmas classic!

When amnesiac Geena Davis starts recalling details of her past life, very bad men show up to kill her. Given that she used to be a highly skilled assassin, it doesn’t go well for them. This unabashedly bloody action flick from the Christmas-loving screenwriter Shane Black is a film about perseverance and, particularly with the arc of Samuel L. Jackson’s disgraced private detective character, redemption. If your relatives can handle the non-stop f-bombs, they’ll love it!

Santa Claus knocks over a bank in this crafty heist flick written by “L.A. Confidential” director Curtis Hanson. It’s a nasty piece of work (Christopher Plummer’s psycho thief will set up shop in your nightmares and never leave), but the crackerjack plotting and game performances from Elliott Gould, Susannah York and a young John Candy make the arsenic go down smooth.

It’s bad enough Rocky Balboa has to fly all the way to freezing-cold Russia to avenge the death of Apollo Creed, but those godless Soviets rub the salt deep into the wound by demanding the fight take place on Christmas Day. “Rocky IV” isn’t often thought of as a Christmas movie, and that’s probably because it’s generally not thought of as a good movie. This is nonsense. Christmas isn’t Christmas without a visit from Paulie’s robot.

Neither underrated nor forgotten as a film, “Trading Places” is nevertheless underestimated as a Christmas classic. It kicks off around Thanksgiving and concludes just after New Year’s Day, but the heart of John Landis’ Reagan-era satire is a humanistic Christmastime formation of an unlikely family unit in Eddie Murphy’s street hustler, Dan Aykroyd’s redeemed rich boy twit, Jamie Lee Curtis’ whip-smart prostitute and Denholm Elliott’s long-suffering butler.

John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz and Harry Carey, Jr. star in John Ford’s western riff on the tale of the three Magi. After robbing a bank in Arizona, the three bandits light out into the desert where they encounter a pregnant woman on the verge of giving birth. They deliver the child but cannot save the life of the mother. Before she dies, she asks the men to take care of her child. This is one of Ford’s most sentimental movies, but it rings true.

Shane Black’s directorial debut is a raucously funny pulp classic in which an inept crook and a private investigator scramble to solve the murder of a young actress. Set at Christmas like almost every Black script, the film perfectly captures the feel of Los Angeles during the holidays. It’s a dizzyingly entertaining crime flick with so many twists that you’ll need to watch it several times just to make sure it all adds up.

Wichita, Kansas lowlifes John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton pull off the perfect Christmas Eve robbery, but their getaway is delayed when a winter storm coats the roads out of town with ice. The longer they’re forced to sit on their $2 million haul, the more likely they are to be caught and killed. This coal-black crime comedy from director Harold Ramis offers little goodwill to men, but if you enjoy laughing at the misfortune of crooks, you’ll find plenty of acerbic Christmas cheer.

When a jewel thief’s getaway is foiled, he’s forced to take a married couple hostage and hole up in their home on Christmas Eve until the police give up their manhunt. He soon learns he couldn’t have found a more toxic situation: The husband and wife hate each other, and the rest of their family is just as awful. Made as a star vehicle for Denis Leary, the real stars of the show are Judy Davis as the vituperative wife and Glynis Johns as the husband’s controlling mother.

You know the long-running HBO series, but you might not have seen this 1972 anthology based on the old EC horror comic book. The film gives you a fiendish Christmas fix with its opening installment, “…And All Through the House,” which finds a murderous Joan Collins being stalked by a homicidal maniac dressed as Santa Claus. This segment was remade for the HBO series, with Mary Ellen Trainor in the Collins role.

The third, final and very best Harold & Kumar adventure finds the boys scouring the town for a Christmas tree to replace the one they’ve accidentally destroyed. It’s all kinds of tasteless (a baby does cocaine), but the chemistry between Kal Penn and John Cho is still there, and the supporting cast (including the obligatory drop-in from Neil Patrick Harris) gives this film more texture than the previous installments. And then there’s Wafflebot. All hail, Wafflebot.

This zany romantic comedy about a high school loser (Ryan Reynolds) who returns home for Christmas 10 years later as a successful (and slimmer) man feints at being mean-spirited. But despite its broadness (Reynolds spends most of the first act encased in a fat suit), it winds up being a big-hearted tale of true love. That uneasy feeling of visiting your hometown for the holidays after a long absence is nicely captured here.

Brushed off as a performance-capture demo reel at the time of its release, Robert Zemeckis’ faithful adaptation of Charles Dickens’ yuletide obligation was indeed spectacular in IMAX 3D. But the dazzling visuals work splendidly in service of the story, which delivers the uplifting goods in this retelling. It helps that Jim Carrey is clearly having a ball as Ebenezer Scrooge.

Stanley Kubrick’s Christmas-set final film is not fun for the whole family. Indeed, the predicament Tom Cruise’s straying husband finds himself in threatens to destroy his family. Shaken by his wife’s tale of an imagined infidelity, Cruise ventures out in search of trouble and winds up at an orgy for wealthy New Yorkers. Ultimately, he remains faithful. In the final scene at FAO Schwarz, Nicole Kidman offers up the most succinct and practical marriage advice you’ll ever hear. After a holiday spent with cranky relatives and screeching kids, you'll need it.

Based on a “This American Life” story, Paul Feig’s comedy is about a group of kids stranded at an airport on Christmas Eve. Rather than spend the night in the “unaccompanied minors” room, the kids sneak out and romp about the closed airport. The tone is “Home Alone” broad, but it’s got loads of heart and a murderer’s row of comedic support from Lewis Black, Rob Corddry, Mindy Kaling, David Koechner and Kristen Wiig.

Whit Stillman’s debut film about Manhattan society kids hanging out over winter break manages to find plenty of amusing universal truths inside its bubble of extreme privilege. As a “winter break” movie, it’s got both Christmas and New Year’s covered (Hanukkah does not register in this ultra-WASP-y milieu), but it’s the yuletide sensibility that prevails. If you’ve never done Christmas in New York City, this is exactly what it feels like.

The folks that brought you Wallace & Gromit (i.e. joy) concocted a wonderful Christmas movie in 2011, and it barely made a blip. The animated film finds Santa’s well-meaning, yet utterly inept son attempting to deliver a forgotten package to a little girl before Christmas morning. To do so, he has to hijack a sleigh and enlist the services of eight untrained reindeer. This goes about as disastrously as expected. But wouldn’t you know it: Everything works out well in the end. This is a delightful film that deserves way more attention.

The original Christmas slasher, and one of the original slasher flicks period (it hit theaters four years before John Carpenter’s “Halloween”), “Black Christmas” finds a group of sorority girls being stalked by a psychopath hiding in their house. That’s it, and that’s more than enough to make this a cherished holiday tradition for horror hounds. Director Bob Clark would go on to make a slightly less malevolent yuletide classic in “A Christmas Story,” and star Margot Kidder would go on to fame in the "Superman" franchise. 

This lovely little film received mixed reviews when it hit theaters less than a month after 9/11, but it’s starting to catch on as a beloved Christmas rom-com. John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale play strangers who meet when they attempt to buy the same pair of cashmere gloves at Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. A little banter leads to dessert at the titular dessert destination, but since both are currently in relationships, they leave their reconnection to fate. The film begins and ends at Christmas, and it’s sure to provoke plenty of “what if” longing for the one who got away.

Hugh Grant plays a happily single cad who lives off the royalties of a popular Christmas jingle written by his late father. When he deviously attempts to pick up women by attending a single parents support group, he bungles his way into the life of a young man (a super young Nicholas Hoult), who’s desperate to find a partner for his depressed mom (Toni Collette). This Chris and Paul Weitz-directed film works you over with laughs and tears.