These days, Christmas movies, broadly and charitably defined, seem to be synonymous with the brassy, hokey, sickly sweet sort of fare that has a permanent home on the Hallmark Channel and is in perpetual rotation on Netflix. But the slop being served on Netflix — Falling for Christmas, Best. Christmas. Ever!, Christmas with You, to name a sampling — is in no way representative of a genre with a long and honorable tradition. Classic films such as Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, and the final quarter of Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You are not only set during the season but also use their tinselled Christmastime setting as a kind of reflecting pool for their characters’ hopes and woes, especially of the romantic sort. Surely nothing is sadder than Christmas in a state of solitude, and nothing more fervently wished for than Christmas in the company of another.