Forget Love Actually: the best alternative Christmas films

It’s become one of the traditions of the modern festive period: arguing about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The explosive 1988 film features, you may recall, a vest-clad Bruce Willis confounding Alan Rickman and his terrorist cohorts’ evil plans in a Los Angeles skyscraper on Christmas Eve – and it’s peppered throughout with fir trees and tinsel.  

Some claim this means it should take its place as a festive staple alongside more conventional classics of the season, It’s a Wonderful Life et al. Opponents furiously insist that a proper Christmas film shouldn’t feature machine guns and explosions, but instead depict rather more heartwarming scenes.

Surely the solution is to acknowledge that both views have some merit – but to move on by creating a new, separate category to describe films which prominently feature Christmas but aren’t particularly Christmassy, films which find their main focus elsewhere: ‘Christmas-adjacent movies’, as it were.

Looking into Christmas alternatives gives you a whole new lease of life in terms of festive viewing that remains relevant to the season but actually offers the chance of a half decent film – as, let’s face it, most out-and-out Christmas films are pretty dire. I’d