The best holiday movies to watch right now on Prime Video

At this point, seemingly everybody who’s written about Wonderful Life in the period after its resurgence in the ’70s (when it fell into the public domain and started popping up every Christmas on dozens of channels) has noted that the film is far darker than its reputation. Where most other classic Christmas films are steeped in warmth and nostalgia—see also: A Christmas Story—Wonderful Life is steeped in melancholy for a world that was and an uncertainty about what life had become. It’s the reverse of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, wherein a good-hearted, middle-class man is warped and frustrated by his inability to live any of his dreams. The movie’s closest thing to a Scrooge figure—Potter—wins out time and again, cackling gleefully about his dominance of the town’s economic affairs, and every victory George wins is simply a victory to keep existing. He, too, has a Christmas epiphany, but it’s not one that convinces him the best thing in life is to live unselfishly. He’s already seen where that got him. No, he realizes the best thing in life is simply to live. []

Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass’ big animated effort for the 1979 Christmas season is a TV special that a ruthless capitalist/avowed objectivist like Bert Cooper would have to love. Never pledging allegiance to a single holiday, the wintry fable of Jack Frost maximizes its programming potential. It could be a Christmas special, or it could commemorate the winter solstice. And with Buddy Hackett narrating in the form of Pardon-Me-Pete, “the world’s most revered groundhog,” it could also count as Rankin/Bass’ salute to that least-revered of February celebrations: Groundhog Day… []

Yes, Miracle On 34th Street is pure Hollywood hokum, a blatant piece of sub-Capra populism designed to advance the controversial proposition that Santa is real and children should be allowed to let their imaginations run free. (How did Fox keep the protestors at bay?) But the film is pretty savvy too, getting a jump on mounting anxieties about the post-war cult of consumerism, soon to be savaged by beatniks, cartoonists, and underground stand-up comics. The story of a real “Kris Kringle” (played by the inimitable Edmund Gwenn) earning the trust of upper management at Macy’s and teaching young Natalie Wood and her progressive mother Maureen O’Hara to believe in Christmas again is really an object lesson in how to put one over on the buying public. What does the Macy’s customer say when Santa sends her to another store to buy her son a fire truck? She congratulates Macy’s on “this wonderful new stunt you’re pullin’.” []

What could be better than a reunion of Julie Andrews and James Garner? The Americanization Of Emily and Victor/Victoria co-stars reunite in the 1999 made-for-TV film One Special Night, a humble holiday classic guaranteed to warm the heart. Playing two perfect strangers forced to hole up together amid a raging snowstorm, this is the kind of film you watch snuggled up with a steaming cup of cocoa, and preferably a loved one. There’s a reason Andrews has built a career out of filling audiences with merriment and delight. “I only believe what I see,” she says in the film—we’ll see about that, Dame Andrews! Christmas is the time for believing, after all. [Jack Smart]

In Planes, Trains & Automobiles, John Hughes pulls off one of the most ambitious gambits of this sort I can recall—a scene so indelible that it threatens to permanently yank the movie off its axis. His previous film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, had squandered a big chunk of its third act on Cameron’s daddy issues (“Who do you love? You love a car!”), and perhaps Hughes recognized that the intensity feels grafted on, just a way station en route to Ferris’ frantic race back home. Planes, Trains & Automobiles is even more broadly yuk-heavy, with Steve Martin using John Candy’s underwear as a washcloth and both of them screaming in unison as they realize they’re driving on the wrong side of the highway, but Hughes nonetheless wants us to see these two bickering travelers as human beings, not merely as punchline factories. When the two are forced to share a hotel room after their flight is cancelled, they do the expected odd-couple routine for a while, with Candy scoring laughs via endless exaggerated throat-clearing. Then shit suddenly gets kinda real. []

This plot will likely sound familiar: Two coworkers who openly hate each other carry on an anonymous love affair through the mail, and neither of them know the other’s pen-name identity. Set in a small store in Budapest where curiously only one of the employees has any sort of a native accent, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around The Corner peaks during the holiday shopping season. Real-life friends Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan play Alfred and Klara, the star-crossed lovers unaware that their loathed co-worker is the person who’s been writing them those lofty letters. The charm and chemistry of the young leads—headstrong Sullavan and lovestruck Stewart—transcends this picture as they battle and flirt, often simultaneously. Just check out the scene when Alfred has figured out that Klara is the writer he loves, and courts her in the shop on Christmas Eve, lit only by holiday lights. You may love this store and its employees so much that you’ll be tempted to check out the 1949 Judy Garland/Van Johnson remake In The Good Old Summertime, which is fine. But by all means, avoid the hackneyed 1998 Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan version, You’ve Got Mail. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake. []