

- Best non christmas movies to watch over christmas movie#
- Best non christmas movies to watch over christmas tv#
But he decides to stick around and find out if he can figure out what’s going on - and he finds that just about everyone in town is keeping secrets, including the woman he’s falling in love with. (I’m not sure why he would bother, because if it’s a suicide, the company wouldn’t have to pay out, but then we wouldn’t have a mystery.) No one, including the sheriff (William Bendix) wants to help the investigator because, well, the victim wasn’t very well-liked. An insurance investigator (Dennis O’Keefe) goes to a small midwestern town to find out if a suicide victim actually killed himself or was murdered. You’ve probably never heard of this film noir, but it’s well worth seeking out. Appropriately, the soundtrack features “The Christmas Blues” by Dean Martin, one of the great “sad” Christmas songs that should be a lot more popular than it is.
Best non christmas movies to watch over christmas movie#
This all sounds dark and serious, and it is, but having the movie set at Christmas works as something of a mental balm, demonstrating that there are some good and nice things in this world, even if it is filled with dirty things and bad people. This leads us to the main plot: Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, and Kevin Spacey work to figure out who killed several people at a diner, including Crowe’s partner, who was involved in the Christmas Eve scandal.

The headline splashed across the newspaper the next morning is “Bloody Christmas” (which happens to be the title of another movie that isn’t on this list). It actually begins on Christmas Eve, with a violent police-station brawl, as several cops, juiced up on massively spiked eggnog, beat several Hispanic and black suspects in their cells. This terrific drama, based on the novel by James Ellroy, delves into police corruption and cover-ups in the LAPD of the early 1950s. Confidential should have won the Best Picture Oscar that year. Titanic is an undeniably great movie, but there’s an argument to be made that L.A.
Best non christmas movies to watch over christmas tv#
Fun fact: This was remade as a TV series, titled Condor, starring Max Irons, William Hurt, and Katherine Cunningham. It actually filmed on location in a cold, wintry New York City, and it really does feel like a Christmas movie: In one scene, Redford hides from the bad guys in Central Park and buys a pretzel from a vendor while a band plays “Good King Wenceslas” in another, Faye Dunaway buys equipment for a ski trip while “Silver Bells” plays. But Three Days of the Condor is such a perfect film, it’ll become one of your holiday-adjacent favorites anyway. Maybe it’s wrong to get a warm and fuzzy feeling from a movie where all of Robert Redford’s co-workers are murdered because he gets too close to a government conspiracy, forcing him to go on the run as he’s hunted down. If you’ve made viewing Die Hard a family holiday tradition, you might want to check out some of these as well. Movies that take place during the holiday season, and may feature brightly lit trees and snow - and maybe even a carol or two - but aren’t about learning the real meaning of the holiday or taking over for Santa because he’s injured.īelow, we’ve listed 16 of our favorite movies that take place at Christmas but aren’t technically Christmas movies. Movies that have that hint of yuletide without all of the usual Christmas trappings and lessons. Scott) - there are many other Christmas-adjacent movies out there. If you’re looking for actual holiday-movie alternatives to watch in December - something that takes place during Christmas but isn’t It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Story, or one of the 97 versions of A Christmas Carol (for the record, the best is the 1984 version with George C. Whenever we discuss our favorite Christmas movies, there’s always that one guy (and it’s always a guy) who chimes in, “What about Die Hard?” And, listen, Die Hard is a great film, but saying it’s a great Christmas film is, at this point, well-trodden territory. This list was originally published in 2017. Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images, Warner Archive/YouTube and Warner Bros.

Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos Courtesy of Warner Brothers/Getty Images, Warner Bros.
