You know Elf (2003) and Love Actually (2003), The Holiday (2006) and Die Hard (1988), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). But do you recall any of the most underrated Christmas movies of all?
Holiday cinema has become a remarkably rigid and reliable canon, and if you haven’t seen any of the golden age classics such as It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) or White Christmas (1954), then stop reading and start with those. But if you’re craving something a little less familiar this Christmas, here are a handful of off-the-beaten-path films worth revisiting.
Trading Places (1983)
Starring ’80s Saturday Night Live icons Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, Trading Places is a Christmas-set comedy about two men from radically different worlds — Aykroyd as a smug, well-heeled commodities trader (long before Patagonia vests and TikTok ruined the finance aesthetic) and Murphy as a charismatic street hustler — whose lives are manipulated for sport by a pair of corrupt, racially prejudiced oligarchs.
What begins as a class-switch farce becomes a sharp indictment of cronyism and elitism, culminating in one of the great comeuppances in American studio comedy. The film also preserves the old New York Stock Exchange trading floor: a roaring, chaotic coliseum of human excess before it was digitized and hollowed out by algorithms and high-frequency trading. What could be more American?
Trading Places is riotously funny and stacked with indelible gags, but its enduring value is its reminder, especially apt at Christmas, that shared humanity cuts across class lines far more easily than the powerful would like to admit.
Scrooged (1988)
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is routinely misunderstood as an anticapitalist parable; it is actually a study in emotional self-exile, the story of a man who avoids love so fiercely he mistakes loneliness for safety. Scrooged is one of the rare adaptations that understands this.
Bill Murray’s Frank Cross isn’t evil; he’s emotionally calloused. His curmudgeonly transgressions — cutting staff bonuses and discarding the only woman who ever loved him — stem from an aversion to intimacy, not avarice or some cartoonish desire to hoard gold like one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s dragons. His spiritual journey is not about renouncing success or wealth, but about rediscovering the human bonds that give life its meaning.
The Ref (1994)
Watching The Ref as a Christmas movie is like listening to Joni Mitchell’s “River” and expecting a carol. You hear the sleigh bells, but the sweetness never arrives. And Santa is drunk, belligerent, and slurring his words.
After a botched robbery, Gus (Denis Leary) winds up holding a married couple (Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis) hostage on Christmas Eve while evading the police inside their home. The twist is that the couple is so venomously dysfunctional that Gus ends up playing reluctant marriage counselor. “Great,” he mutters. “I hijacked my parents.”
While most canonical Christmas films center on idealized families, The Ref confronts the messier reality: marriages held together by inertia, resentful children, and extended families that know exactly how to push every last button. Its emotional core lies not in reconciliation through sentimentality, but in survival through brutal honesty.
It’s the kind of Christmas movie that deepens with age. Each viewing reveals new truths about compromise, resentment, and the awkward grace of choosing to endure one another, which is precisely why it recalls “River.” Not all Christmases are warm or narrated by Nat King Cole.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
For those who unironically cite Die Hard as their favorite Christmas movie, consider a sleeker, more sardonic alternative.
Written and directed by Shane Black, the architect of Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is an eccentric LA noir against the backdrop of Christmas lights. A petty thief (Robert Downey Jr.) accidentally lands an acting audition, is mistaken for a method actor, and finds himself paired with a private detective (Val Kilmer) to research a role, only to stumble into a real murder involving his childhood crush.
The film unfolds like an opera buffa of deception, laced with razor-sharp dialogue, self-awareness, and holiday nihilism. It features Downey Jr. before Marvel industrialized his charisma, Kilmer at his driest and funniest, and Michelle Monaghan as the emotional anchor.
Klaus (2019)
Sergio Pablos’s Klaus may well be the finest Christmas film of the 21st century, and it somehow remains criminally overlooked.
Voiced by Jason Schwartzman, Jesper is the spoiled son of the Royal Postmaster General, exiled to the frozen Norwegian outpost of Smeerensburg to establish a functioning post office or forfeit his inheritance. What he finds is a bitter town fractured by clan warfare and mutual contempt. How does one foster correspondence in a place where everyone despises one another?
It is only through an unlikely friendship with Klaus (J.K. Simmons), a reclusive woodsman, that Jesper discovers the power of generosity — and the catalytic nature of kindness. “A true selfless act always sparks another,” Klaus explains, as small gestures ripple outward and begin to heal the town.
Among the film’s many inspired touches is the way it grounds Santa’s mythos in necessity rather than whimsy: chimney descents emerge from stealth, the naughty list from Jesper’s refusal to reward bad behavior, and reindeer from simple local practicality — stronger, sturdier, and better suited than horses.
REVIEW: AVATAR FIRE AND ASH IS A SPECTACLE OF CGI THAT SIGNIFIES NOTHING
Warm, gorgeously animated, and beautifully scored by Alfonso Aguilar, Klaus is a story about perseverance, community, and moral contagion. How this isn’t already a modern classic remains a small mystery.
Honorable Mention: Too recent to call underrated just yet, The Holdovers is already among the finest modern Christmas films: a poignant, deeply humane portrait of loneliness, grace, and unexpected companionship. One of my favorite films of 2023, it’s well worth correcting if you missed it in theaters.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
