The Criterion Collection

The most extravagant holiday celebration in all of our films (in all of film?), the Ekdahl family’s annual tradition takes up the entire first third of Ingmar Bergman’s fairy tale Fanny and Alexander. Redolent of lutefisk and flatulent uncles, this Christmas may be the calm before the storm for the Ekdahls, but it’s so lavish and inviting that it is the film’s most memorable movement.

Blast of Silence, Allen Baron’s coldhearted B noir about a hit man in New York during the holidays, offers a grimmer than grim yuletide—but also a chance to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree circa 1961.

Another New York noel, but this one’s quite a bit more posh. The first act of Metropolitan, Whit Stillman’s peppy, preppy portrait of debutante society, is a wealthy wonderland of Christmas trees and glitzy gowns.

An exquisite journey back to England at the turn of the twentieth century, Merchant Ivory’s Howards End pays tribute to that most nerve-racking of holiday traditions: shopping. Vanessa Redgrave and Emma Thompson’s trip to the department store may be tiring, but it sure is alluring.

Lillian Gish is something like the Christmas angel in Charles Laughton’s gothic horror The Night of the Hunter—providing a sweet holiday daydream of a denouement after the nightmare that haunts most of the film.

You may want to bundle up while watching Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine: the desolate wintry landscape of 1940s rural Quebec is basically the film’s main character. The climax features what we pray is the gloomiest Christmas Eve ever conceived.

Black Narcissus, Powell and Pressburger’s tale of nuns on a mission, briefly leaves its sweeping Himalayan setting for a flashback to Sister Clodagh’s cozy memories of a time before she entered the convent, with Christmas caroling and a handsome suitor.

Home for the holidays, Rohmer-style. In My Night at Maud’s, an engineer’s Catholic piety is put to the test when, marooned by snow and alcohol, he finds himself sleeping over in the apartment of an attractive, intelligent divorced mother on Christmas night.

A brand-new, bow-wrapped television would seem like the perfect Christmas present for a lonely widow in the 1950s—but not, as in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, when it’s a gift from her self-centered children intended to distract her from seeing the man she loves.

More selfish offspring! Make Way for Tomorrow, Leo McCarey’s emotionally bludgeoning tale of a sweet elderly couple being kept apart by their grown kids opens with a pleasant Christmas gathering—but, trust us, the mood goes downhill from there.

Thanks to a meeting with none other than Jack the Ripper, Lulu’s Christmas in Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Pandora’s Box may take the fruitcake for worst holiday ever.

What’s the season without a little dysfunction? Or a lot of it, as in the case of Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, a family portrait bursting at the seams with love and sex, laughter and misery, age-old grudges and newfound romances.