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Stand on a busy city street one week before Christmas – and spit! – and you’re likely going to hit a cinematic Christmas watchlist, complete with a number of recognizable films from seasons past, hopefully possessing one or two gems that you’d never seen before.
Or – spit! – and you’ll hit a child begging their parent for an expensive gift. Never mind that it’s a week’s countdown until Christmas Day. Never mind that the household Christmas tree will soon be knee-deep in wrapped goodies. Never mind that the whole idea of being good all year isn’t exactly a requirement anymore in order to earn a mountain of gifts on Christmas morning. Times certainly change, don’t they?
But what hasn’t changed is the notion of selfless giving during the holiday season, for some. And here at the Pickwick Drive-In, we don’t wait for an invitation. The Pickwick simply comes with the gifts.
The Pickwick doesn’t ask for a wishlist from our viewers, and we don’t spy on our viewers in order to figure out their favorite candies, their favorite scented candles, their top secret garment size. Instead, the Pickwick intends this season to deliver up a Christmas watchlist of seven films (that’s four films & an additional three trailers to picque your curiosity) certain to remind you what’s worth celebrating this holiday season: heartwarming Christmas traditions, life-affirming relationships with family & friends, hilarious incidents of home invasion that ultimately put a child’s life in danger, and the existential dread that comes with wondering what the world would be like had you never existed.
Luckily, these seven films exist, and the Pickwick is thrilled to showcase them. While they might seem like the safest picks for a Christmas watchlist of this kind, the Pickwick intends not only to trim the Christmas tree this season but also to take a singular look at these long-lauded films.
So – ho-ho-ho – it’s time to stay home with the Pickwick with seven motion pictures that will deliver the perfect cinematic gifts for the holiday season.
A Christmas Story
F A M I L Y C O M E D Y
You will love this movie if you asked for child-friendly firearms, Chinese food, hand soap, home decor, or outdoor winter apparel for Christmas.
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1983 | Rated PG | 94 minutes | d. Bob Clark | s. Jean Shepherd & Leigh Brown, et al. | c. Reginald H. Morris
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I have to imagine that most kids today never know the anguish of wanting a gift for Christmas so badly … and never getting it. I have friends with kids, and those kids are going home with toys from Target when Santa’s visit is only two weeks away. But that wasn’t me, growing up. I am still haunted by the emotional anguish of never getting a Furbee – but, luckily, I’ve never known the physical anguish of almost shooting my eye out, like my widescreen avatar Ralphie Parker.
Directed by Bob Clark (who also directed the much darker Christmas slasher Black Christmas (1974)), the film follows young Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) one winter season as he both contends with day-to-day school life, neighborhood bullies, and department store Santas in the days leading up to the big holiday, having set his sights on getting a Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle for Christmas, despite his parents’ insistence that he’ll likely shoot his eye out. To that end, Ralphie employs his parents, his school teacher, and more in order to earn leverage that might seem him gifted such a deadly weapon on Christmas morning.
For any child who has desperately longed for a particular Christmas gift — only to find that it wasn’t what you really needed or (better yet) didn’t receive it — A Christmas Story is the Christmas Eve story for you.
The real gift is this, this messaging: Life gets better, kids.
The film possesses a nostalgic warmth that may have only been tempered by the 24-hour TNT marathon screenings, but as a motion picture imbued with the charm of Christmas and childhood, wintry days and wish fulfillment, A Christmas Story remains one of the perfect artifacts of holiday moviemaking, a portrait as much about expectations as it is about the dashing of them, as it is about our reaction to what we imagine is a life-changing setback.
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TRAILER
Lethal Weapon (1987)
A C T I O N
Home Alone
F A M I L Y C O M E D Y
You will love this movie if you asked for aftershave lotion, boobytrap warfare, child abandonment, pizza delivery, or suburban legends for Christmas.
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1990 | Rated PG | 103 minutes | d. Chris Columbus | s. John Hughes | c. Julio Macat
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As the story goes, I was abandoned as a baby in an infant seat at a Whataburger in central Texas. I don’t remember the experience and – therefore – I’m not triggered by movies about children in peril or commercials about fast food joints. At that time, my mom had driven many hours to meet a man at Whataburger for the sole purpose of dating and potentially living happily ever after.
Alas, their rendezvous didn’t work out.
Later, my mom would say, “At least I had a really good f*****g burger.”
I imagine it’s as close to the adventure that Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) has one Christmas when he is left – home alone – by his family when his family leaves the Chicago suburbs for a vacation in Paris. Left alone, Kevin cares for himself as best he can, day to day, until two local burglars (Joe Pesci & Daniel Stern) set their sights on his vulnerable home. What ensues is a cartoon-like showdown of homemade booby traps and well-placed Micro Machines as Kevin defends the house from the two bungling intruders.
But more important than Kevin’s mission to defend his home in the absence of family, is the film’s mission to defend what remains sacred about the holiday season: defending the Spirit of Christmas through the film’s stories of forgiveness, grace, perseverance, redemption, and home delivery pizza.
What more must be defended every holiday season than that?
Home Alone possesses that perfect holiday spirit with the X-Factor that sets it apart from being a film of the 1950s or 1960s. That secret ingredient is the slapstick violence that transforms director Chris Columbus’ film into a bridge between the rather pedestrian holiday fare of years ago and the progressive holiday moviemaking that would come, evidence that the missing component was not simply a home delivery pizza – or a child left behind at a Whataburger in central Texas.
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TRAILER
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
F A M I L Y
Die Hard
A C T I O N
You will love this movie if you asked for European cigarettes, Hostess Twinkies, more FBI guys, a Rolex wristwatch, or remote detonators for Christmas.
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1988 | Rated R | 132 minutes | d. John McTiernan | s. Jeb Stuart & Steven E. de Souza | c. Jan de Bont
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The debate is over. Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
Yippee ki yay, film fans.
And now that that’s out of the way …
When it comes to the holidays, Die Hard remains one of the first crossover movies that I had ever seen. Yes, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is obviously a holiday film, just as John Carpenter’s Halloween is obviously a holiday motion picture, but Die Hard – a blend of Christmas Eve and chaotic action – is the perfect cinematic gift every year.
In the film, John McClane (Bruce Willis) is a NYC cop fighting a number of battles. He’s backed to the wall against a number of urban crime cases in the Big Apple, but he’s also fighting to save his marriage & family, as his wife (Bonnie Bedelia) successfully navigates a corporate business job in Los Angeles. So when McClane visits the esteemed Nakatomi Plaza in LA for the Christmas holiday, and it’s simultaneously overrun by terrorists (led by Alan Rickman in his first starring role, believe it or not), the wintry celebration will be fueled by much more than egg nog.
Today, I won’t forget that Mom insisted that we rent this movie on VHS, and though my viewing of it didn’t immediately coincide with Christmas, I still equate it with the holidays, bookended as it is with seasonal music, even concluding with a snowstorm of shredded paperwork. Despite the action sequences & violence that sometime encourage viewers to forget the heart — the loving marriage, the family waiting at home on Christmas Eve, Powell’s pregnant wife, and the Christmas packaging tape that affixes a very consequential firearm to McClane’s back — Die Hard is a Christmas movie, even if you forgot that the entire film takes place during an office holiday party. How the debate has lasted so long, I will never know.
“Don’t you have any Christmas music?” McClane asks Argyle as he is fortuitously whisked away to Nakatomi Plaza in a limousine against a backdrop of Run-DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis.”
“This is Christmas music!” Argyle assures him, suggesting that the hip hop-infused carol is as much a holiday standard as anything recorded by Brend Lee or Bing Crosby.
There is no more need for debate here. Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The filmmakers told us so in the first few minutes of the film.
And perhaps that’s part of my love for this film, as much as for the holiday.Wh
Whatever I hoped for, nothing can ever prepare me for what the day will bring, and all that the day provides never fully measures up with what I had wished for, what I wrote for in a child-like letter to Santa Claus.
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TRAILER
The Holdovers (2023)
D R A M E D Y
It’s a Wonderful Life
D R A M A
You will love this movie if you asked for affordable housing, hidden gymnasium swimming pools, hydrangea bushes, locker room shower robes, or a suitcase that could double for a raft of the boat sank for Christmas.
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1946 | Rated PG | 130 minutes | d. Frank Capra | s. Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett, et al. | c. Joseph Walker & Joseph Biroc
***
For those who haven’t seen it, It’s a Wonderful Life is the classic story of George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), a small town dreamer hopefully prepared to travel the world, attend college, and rule the world. But when life — obligations, business, love, marriage, and children — interrupt his life’s goals to the point of bankruptcy, George makes a fateful wish that he had never been born. And when his impish guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers) shows George what the world would be like had he never existed, George begins to understand what a role he played in the lives of so many.
It’s a Wonderful Life is charmingly & comedically & dramatically & magically adept at making us ask ourselves what the world would be like if a single piece of our life was suddenly missing.
The answer = a whole #^&$!*@ lot.
Capra’s classic holiday film was not only the first legitimate holiday movie I’d ever seen (before Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Home Alone (1990), and more) but also the movie that started me on my journey of collecting physical media. Today, I’m certain that I could have discovered a DVD of this motion picture for my collection, but my memory of this movie insists that I recorded it from cable TV (without commercials) to a VHS cassette tape.
“Why do you need a videocassette recording of this movie?” my uncle asked me. “Cable TV plays it every year.”
“But cable TV might not play it forever,” I told him, not knowing then that cable TV would — in fact — seemingly play it forever. And yet not knowing then that every movie ever made would not be available forever on a streaming service.
Support physical media. Streaming services are momentary.
This classic, cinematic holiday film tells the story of a man envisioning what the world would be without him, just as this movie became the origin story of my love for physical media and movies …
… In the event that the world somehow has to exist without them.
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Chris Kaine is the most amateur film essayist whom you may ever imagine. He earnestly contends that he was named after the actor Chris Sarandon, because he was either conceived while his parents watched Fright Night (1985) in his paternal grandparents’ basement, or because of their love for The Princess Bride (1987), which stars a character by the name of “Humperdink,” which is pretty funny, if you think about it.
Late-Night at the Pickwick Drive-In 
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