30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

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The notion of movies to “get you through the holidays” sounds rather dour, especially since some of my choices are about people who are having problems getting through the holidays.

Many of these films have one thing in common: The holidays represent the only time of the year when families, especially those with buried issues, get together at all. A typical family film in the genre airs all the dirty laundry and opens all the old wounds.

One curiosity I’ve noticed is that Thanksgiving films are more likely to tilt toward the emotionally fraught, and Christmas films are more likely to be comedies and heart-warmers.

Setting that aside, some of these titles are just plain great films, no matter what. For example, What’s Cooking?; The Thin Man; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; and John Huston’s heartbreaking final film, The Dead.

One of these is just plain bizarre—Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Bad Santa pushes right through the boundaries of good taste.

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