From <i>Goodfellas</i> to <i>It’s A Wonderful Life</i>, we round up the films everyone should watch during the holidays.

The proper collective name for Christmas films is surely “an embarrassment”. As in life, so on the screen. The season is a licence for roiling sentimentality, whether it’s happiness or sadness, togetherness or loneliness. Because it keeps coming round and round again, so the same movies infallibly recur, too, many of them about as welcome as a stale turkey sandwich.

Elf? Too obvious. Christmas at Hogwarts, with Harry Potter’s thrilling present, the Cloak of Invisibility? Not after the age of eight, thank you. Home Alone? No thanks, even without taking into consideration the unedifying later career of young Mr Macaulay Culkin

Better, much better, are those passing Christmas scenes in less dedicated films. In Mean Girls, there’s that great performance of “Jingle Bell Rock” when the ghetto-blaster gets kicked off the stage and the meanies improvise their way through anyway. Or Patrick Bateman’s Christmas drinks in American Psycho when he intones with such perfect deadness, “Have a holly jolly Christmas,” and one of the girls says to him, “Patrick, you’re such a grinch – what does grinch want for Christmas?” A question often better not asked. Or, then again, in Die Hard, it is never less than a treat to see Mr Bruce Willis send Mr Alan Rickman that most memorable of greeting cards: his dead sidekick, slumped in the lift, wearing a Santa hat, with the message “Now I have a machine gun, ho-ho-ho” scrawled across his chest. That’s the spirit!

There are certain films, though, that get Christmas right, that cut through it with style. Here are MR PORTER’s top 10.

This brought together the devil-may-care Mr William Powell as the hard-drinking, retired private eye Nick Charles, and the lovely Ms Myrna Loy as his newly married heiress wife Nora (a partnership so successful they went on to make 14 films together). Mr WS Van Dyke cast Ms Loy after pushing her into a swimming pool at a Hollywood party to see how she would react. Her aplomb won her the part. Together, this pair have a risqué ease that still seems inspiring as well as funny. Nick and Nora come to New York City for the Christmas holidays and are soon caught up in a case, which is eventually solved at a high-stakes dinner party. It’s the high life, this film. When Nora meets Nick in a hotel bar for a martini and he mentions it’s his sixth, instead of reproving him she immediately orders another five for herself. When she gives him an airgun for Christmas and he starts shooting the balloons off the Christmas tree from a rather surprising variety of positions reclining on the sofa, she just looks on sedately in her furs. Do try this at home.

The directorial debut of Mr Shane Black, the writer of Lethal Weapon, this crime caper revived the genre perfected in The Thin Man. It’s half romantic comedy, half murder mystery, as that title so cunningly suggests. Mr Robert Downey Jr plays Harry Lockhart, a petty criminal. Running from the police, and wounded after a botched burglary, he bursts into an audition for a part in a film and is such a convincing method actor he wins a screen test. Mr Val Kilmer plays the tough, gay private eye, Perry Van Shrike, assigned to help him prepare for the role. This improbable pair are soon involved together in an insanely complicated Christmas-time plot, involving Harry’s long-lost first girlfriend Harmony (Ms Michelle Monaghan, possibly the sexiest wearer ever of a Santa suit) and an evil film producer. Mr Black has always been a big Christmas buff, using it as a backdrop in nearly all his films, including Iron Man 3. At one point, Mr Downey Jr is energetically tortured with electrodes attached to his genitals, while Mr Kilmer feebly protests, “Give the guy a break – it’s Christmas, you know.” Puts those sprouts into perspective.

Family complications looming? None compares to those exposed in this appallingly intricate comedy-drama by Mr Arnaud Desplechin, a Cannes favourite. Ms Catherine Deneuve plays a matriarch gathering her extended family, including three grown-up, deeply troubled, if not actually insane, children for Christmas, in a small town in northern France. There she tells them that she has leukemia, which killed her eldest child as a boy, and her only chance is a bone marrow transplant donated by one of her children or grandchildren. “I’m taking back what’s mine,” this monster says, smiling scarily. That’s if they agree. Even after she’s told her son Henri (Mr Mathieu Amalric) she never loved him. This fragmented narrative, with its addresses to camera, sounds merely grim. Actually it’s one of the great insights into the whole family tangle that Christmas infallibly involves.

If you enjoyed Mr Billy Bob Thornton as the bad guy in the first series of the TV Fargo, meet the original. Ever since this movie (directed by antihero specialist Mr Terry Zwigoff, assisted by the Coen brothers), Mr Thornton has complained that “casting directors call me up when they need an asshole”. Quite right, too. He plays Willie T Soke, a sex-addicted alcoholic who masquerades as Santa every year in a department store so he can rob it, assisted by his incredibly foul-mouthed dwarf elf accomplice Marcus Skidmore (Mr Tony Cox). The abusiveness is terrific and Soke doesn’t have a single redeeming feature. “I am living fucking proof there is no Santa Claus,” he tells a luckless fat boy, Thurman Merman, who’s desperate to believe in him. For dead-eyed stares and total moral degeneracy, Mr Thornton can’t be touched. At some point over Christmas, you always need an antidote. Here’s the baddest bad Santa ever, vomiting and wetting himself, just for starters. (Maybe give this year’s sequel a wide berth, though – that’s the wrong kind of bad.)

Here’s the office Christmas party from hell. Naive, ever-hopeful desk drudge Bud Baxter (Mr Jack Lemmon) lends his apartment to his superiors for illicit nookie, hoping for promotion that way. But one of the girls who has been talked into this by the slimy personnel director Sheldrake (Mr Fred MacMurray) is the very one poor Bud rates as the tops, lift operator Fran (Ms Shirley Maclaine). Just as Bud delightedly takes her into the incredibly raucous Christmas party, she’s nobbled by Sheldrake’s drunken secretary who tells her she too is just one among the many in the office who have had “a little ring-a-ding-ding” with her boss. Jingle bells! Mr Billy Wilder’s follow-up to Some Like It Hot, The Apartment deservedly won five Oscars, including Best Picture.

Based on a true story, directed by Mr Steven Spielberg, starring Mr Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank, a teenage con artist and fraudster on the run, and Mr Tom Hanks as Carl, the FBI agent on his trail, this has one of the saddest of all Christmas scenes. Frank, who comes from a broken home, has just escaped once more from Carl’s custody. He goes back to the family house at snowy Christmas time and looks in through the window at his mother and a little girl whom he realises is the half-sister he has never known, while Mr Frank Sinatra merrily warbles “The Christmas Song”: “Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe help to make the season bright... Merry Christmas to you.” When the cops come, he begs them to get him into the car. Not treated as a minor, Frank is sentenced to 12 years solitary in maximum security. And you thought your Christmas was turning out rough.

Mr Martin Scorsese has always been excited by the mob and Goodfellas, adapted from the non-fiction book Wiseguy, is maybe his ultimate tribute – and a hell of a ride. One of its key scenes is a Christmas party at the Copacabana nightclub where, in a single unbroken shot, over the Ronettes belting out “Frosty The Snowman”, James “Jimmy the Gent” Conway (Mr Robert de Niro at his scariest) berates his fellow perps. One after another they come through the Merry Christmas door, having ostentatiously spent money on presents for their wives, just after a successful robbery, the Lufthansa heist. First, it’s a white car, then it’s a white mink coat. “Are you stupid or what? Did you hear what I said? Don’t buy anything… What’s the matter with you!” Jimmy snarls. Gangsters enjoy Christmas, too. Good to know.

Here’s the one you can’t avoid – but why ever would you want to? Its director, Mr Frank Capra, showed it to his own family every Christmas for the rest of his own long life. George Bailey (Mr James Stewart) has given up on his own dreams, and is about to commit suicide on Christmas Eve. But his guardian angel (Mr Henry Travers) shows him just how many people he has helped and saved in his life and how different and worse his small town would have been without him. This is one of the great sentimental tearjerkers – although it has also been called “the most terrifying Hollywood film ever made”. Either way, it’s cinema’s A Christmas Carol.

Loved Love & Friendship, this year’s perfect Ms Jane Austen trouvaille? Metropolitan was the 1990 debut film of its director, Mr Whit Stillman, maybe the most literate film-maker of them all. Filmed on a tiny budget ($225,000) financed by selling his apartment, it gives us riches in the form of a group of incredibly privileged college students, the self-proclaimed UHBs, the urban haute bourgeoisie. They skip between swell parties over the Christmas holiday in Manhattan, when not lounging elegantly and talking philosophy with amazing hauteur. Into this tight-knit group comes an interloper: left-wing, middle-class student Tom (Mr Edward Clements), who meets among them a gentle, pretty girl with a penchant for Ms Austen, Audrey (Ms Carolyn Farina). She soon develops a crush on him that Tom doesn’t appreciate until almost too late. It’s the sweetest romance in the most spoiled world. Mr Stillman likes using chapter headings in his films. The one for 25 December, “Traditional Christmas Celebrations”, introduces nothing at all. It’s followed smartly by “26th: Orgy Week Begins”.

And sometimes you just have to go full-out soppy. In The Holiday, written and directed by Miss Nancy Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give, _It’s Complicate_d, What Women Want), two high-achieving but lonely women, let down by the guys in their lives, spontaneously swap homes for Christmas to get away from it all. This pair, so strangely undervalued by their men, are country cottage-dwelling Daily Telegraph columnist Iris, played by Ms Kate Winslet, and LA movie trailer mogul Amanda, played by Ms Cameron Diaz. In lush LA, Iris hits it off so well with lumpy but nice film composer Miles (Mr Jack Black) that when her British love rat Jasper (Mr Rufus Sewell) turns up on her doorstep, she joyously gives him the elbow. Meanwhile, back in deepest Surrey, Amanda has bumped into Iris’s brother, charmer Graham (Mr Jude Law). She thinks he’s good for a restorative fling, at least, although she doesn’t like the way he keeps getting calls from other girls on his phone – until she discovers that they are his little daughters and he’s a dear widower dad. Best Christmas ever for both ensues! All together! In Surrey! And tears for you. Not one to watch home alone. Mr Law, currently fancifully impersonating the Pope and already best known for period dramas, said he found it hard to play an ordinary contemporary part that didn’t require him to wear any special clothes or adopt an accent, but then Ms Meyers sent him a collection of Mr Clark Gable movies to show him how to carry it off. So it’s true. Attitude can carry off even a ropey crew neck (but play it safe and invest in a better one).

**Click here for MR PORTER’s festive gift guide **