Season’s streamings

It’s December, and the Holiday-Movie Industrial Complex is delivering a sleigh-load of Christmas comfort watches. Hallmark is releasing 24 new flicks for 2025, while Lifetime is offering up 14. And while novelty has its pleasures — this is probably the first year with a festive pickleball film, for instance — if you want to mix it up a little, here are some suggestions.

● SOMETHING OLD: Think of it as “the other Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie.”

The number one film on Rotten Tomatoes’ 100 Best Christmas Movies list is Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (available to rent on YouTube or Prime Video), and its stellar rating mostly comes down to what’s called “the Lubitsch touch” — a tone that’s subtle, sophisticated, witty and just a little melancholy.

This delicate 1940 romantic comedy, set during the holiday season, stars Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as two Budapest store employees who can’t stand each other in person but are unknowingly falling in love through an anonymous pen-pal correspondence.

As Dec. 25 approaches, the characters experience comic misunderstandings, difficult truths and some hard-won hopefulness. It’s Christmas, Lubitsch-style.

● SOMETHING NEW: If you’re hankering for a fresh — but also reliably predictable — 2025 outing, Tinsel Town (Prime Video) introduces us to Brad Mack (Kiefer Sutherland), an arrogant, aging action-movie star who somehow finds himself booked to do a holiday pantomime at a small community theatre in northern England.

It’s the standard festive fish-out-of-water plot, with lessons learned, parent-child bonds healed and cross-cultural miscommunications cleared up. (In England, a “Christmas jumper” isn’t as dark as it sounds.)

Sutherland commits to the bit, there’s supporting work from Derek Jacobi and the always welcome Rebel Wilson, and the film gets comic mileage out of the kooky nature of British panto, which involves fractured fairy tales, cross-dressing, call-and-response crowd work, rude humour, big musical numbers and people in horse costumes.

In Jingle Bell Heist (Netflix), a go-getting young American woman (Olivia Holt) and a hapless British tech bloke (Connor Swindells), both stuck in the overworked, underpaid gig economy, scheme to rob a London department store owned by a villainous magnate on Christmas Eve.

As a heist flick, its plot improbabilities require holiday miracles to work. (At one point, the security guards are conveniently distracted by an argument about whether Batman Returns is a Christmas movie.) Still, Jingle Bell Heist delivers a sweet, tentative romance and lots of twinkly seasonal atmosphere.

● SOMETHING FUNNY: TV comedies often offer snack-sized holiday episodes, with such shows as The Simpsons, Community, The Office and Brooklyn Nine-Nine getting into the holiday mood.

Bob’s Burgers has some standout Yuletide moments, and The Bleakening (season 8, episode 6, on Disney+) sees the wacky but loving Belcher clan in search of Linda’s stolen Christmas tree.

The kids blame the Bleaken, a kind of anti-Santa with claws and feathers who steals children’s presents, but the truth is even more surprising. Expect awkward holiday parties with oddball guests, punning burger names, Linda dancing like no one’s watching, and a bonus message about community, acceptance and the modest joys of a perfectly imperfect Belcher family Christmas.

● SOMETHING BLUE: As a reminder that Christmas, for many people, can be a time of stress and sadness, you can’t get more viscerally effective than the Fishes episode of The Bear (season 2, episode 6 on Disney+).

In a flashback that goes deep, deep, deep into Berzatto family dysfunction, we see matriarch Donna (played with devastating vulnerability by Jamie Lee Curtis) preparing a traditional Christmas feast of seven fish dishes, while her whole family waits on tenterhooks for the moment she goes from “Get out of my kitchen and stop trying to help me” to “Why is no one helping me?” This year, the abrupt emotional turnaround is a doozy.

With jumpy camerawork, nervous comedy, overlapping screaming, intermittent fork throwing and a lot of generalized chaos, Fishes can be a harrowing watch. But if your family celebrations sometimes get a little tense, Fishes might even cheer you up: Really, any holiday get-together that doesn’t involve an emergency crew will seem breezy by comparison.

● CHRISTMAS-ISH: If you want to dodge the annual “Die Hard is/is not a Christmas movie” controversy, recently reignited by Macaulay Culkin, you might want to try another Christmas-adjacent genre film.

To mark the year that saw the passing of iconic movie star Robert Redford, why not try Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (available to rent on YouTube)? Redford plays a desk-bound CIA analyst (“I read books!”) who becomes a reluctant field agent when he returns from lunch to find all his co-workers murdered. With Faye Dunaway as an enigmatic ally and Max von Sydow as the eerily calm contract killer on his tail, he’s soon caught up in a dangerous, dark conspiracy.

With Christmas referenced through grey, wintry weather, a cancelled ski vacation and snatches of minor-key carols, this tense, terse film offers the kind of cynical seasonal counterprogramming only a deeply paranoid 1970s thriller can.

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