We flock to It’s a Wonderful Life because it’s our therapy, a culturally endorsed, holiday-approved balm for all the miseries and disappointments that pile up around us with each passing year.
Meet Me in St. Louis and the gap between what we want the holidays to be and what they actually are.
A Christmas Story, children who dream of growing up, and adults who dream of being young again.
Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan has the appeal of being both a Christmas movie and an anthropological study of goy life among the upper crusties.
A movie about Christmas is a movie about rituals as well as magic.
Spielberg believes in magic all right, Christmas or otherwise.
Not all movies are cinema; The Holiday is certainly not cinema—but it is upbeat and kind and romantic and Jude Law is just, like, extremely hot here.
Processing pain and tragedy is a place where The West Wing succeeds as a show, picking and prodding at a wound until it hurts, so that the healing can begin.
It feels good to watch familiar characters behave the way we know they will, to let a movie carve a groove into your heart.
Add a little eggnog to that rum. Settle in to your corner of the couch. Turn on the flatscreen. Refer to this guide to made-for-television holiday films.
