chill out with these

12 best Christmas movies to binge during the Houston arctic freeze

Yes, this is a Christmas movie.

Die Hard Movies/20th Century Fox/Facebook

Few things say "Netflix and chill" like a literal arctic freeze. As Houston preps for at least two days of freezing temperatures, many are wisely staying indoors, camped out in front of the TV.

With that in mind, we've rounded up our favorite holiday movies to steam and, natch, binge. Many our classics, some are kooky comedies, and one sparks a dispute if it's even a holiday movie at all.

Stay warm and add these to your queue and watchlist as you wait out our below-30s temps. Here's our list of what to binge in Houston.

Best Christmas movie (more than 50 years old)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

With help from his guardian angel, a suicidal-on-Christmas Jimmy Stewart finds out how messed up life would be if he wasn’t around. Honestly, you should know this movie backwards and forwards by now.

Best Christmas movie (more than 25 years old)
A Christmas Story (1983)

You most likely know this movie backwards and forwards, since TBS usually shows this all the freakin’ time during the holidays. Nevertheless, the saga of little Ralphie Parker getting a BB gun for Christmas is a timeless standard. And we sure love Dad and his Major Award.

Best adaption of A Christmas Carol — for kids
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1993)

No doubt your little ones will enjoy the sight of the Charles Dickens classic being recreated by Kermit, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and them, with Michael Caine killing it as the one-and-only Ebenezer Scrooge.

Best adaption of A Christmas Carol — for adults
Scrooged (1988)

Bill Murray assumes the Scrooge role as a morally bankrupt TV exec who learns the true meaning of Christmas. Robert Mitchum, Karen Allen, Alfre Woodard, Carol Kane and Bobcat Goldthwait are a few of the folk who appear in this all-star holiday jam.

Best Christmas horror flick
Black Christmas (1974)

Forget about the two recent remakes. The original, directed by A Christmas Story’s Bob Clark and starring Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder as sorority girls being terrorized by a killer during the holidays, is still the bloody standard.

Best foul-mouthed Christmas movie starring Billy Bob Thornton
Bad Santa (2003)

Although his 2005 black-comic caper The Ice Harvest comes a close second, nothing beats this R-rated laugh riot. Thornton plays a miserable, drunken, department-store Santa who tries to pull off a crime while instilling some holiday cheer in a little boy.

Best Christmas movie from Shane Black
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

A pre-Iron Man Robert Downey, Jr. and a pre-throat cancer Val Kilmer become a pair of unlikely sleuths in this sarcastic neo-noir, one of many flicks the writer/director (Lethal Weapon, The Nice Guys) has set during the holiday season.

Best little-known Christmas movie
Comfort & Joy (1984)

Coming straight from Scotland, Local Hero director Bill Forsyth did an offbeat holiday flick where a DJ (Bill Paterson) gets over a breakup while reluctantly becoming part of a turf war between rival ice-cream vendors.

Best Christmas movie for goths
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

We’re sure all those kids who grew up wearing black and listening to The Cure rejoiced when producer Tim Burton and director Henry Selick joined forces for a stop-motion animated flick where a Halloween-minded dude aims to take over Christmas.

Best LGBT Christmas movie
Tangerine (2015)

Before he went on to make the Oscar-nominated The Florida Project, filmmaker Sean Baker did this unlikely holiday film about a transgender sex worker (transgender actress Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) who spends Christmas Eve looking for her cheating boyfriend/pimp.

Best budding Christmas movie
Friday After Next (2002)

The final installment in Ice Cube’s hood-comedy trilogy has him and Mike Epps serving as strip-mall security guards ducking thugs, angry grandmothers, and a gift-jacking Santa. They still find time to get high though.

Best Christmas movie that is indisputably a Christmas movie — The End
Die Hard (1988)

Bruce Willis, terrorists, explosions – blah, blah, blah. We know it came out during the summer. But all of it happened on Christmas Eve, so it’s a Christmas movie. We’re done talking about it—let the debates begin!

Steven Devadanam contributed to this story.

Movie Review

Daniel Craig shines in Queer, an unapologetic tale of love and loss

Photo courtesy of A24

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in Queer.

As recently as the late 2010s, if a movie was made about an LGBTQ+ character, it was more than likely about their coming out experience. Romance, if it existed, was typically chaste, and actual sex was almost completely out of the question. Things have changed dramatically in the 2020s, to the point that a major movie star has no issue starring in a film called Queer.

Based on the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, the film features William Lee (Daniel Craig), whom everyone calls just Lee, a writer living in 1950s-era Mexico City who spends most of his time haunting local bars with friends like fellow writer Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman) and hitting on younger men. His early interactions in the film seem to indicate that Lee has a bad reputation within the local gay community, as multiple people avoid him or give him odd looks.

Lee senses an opportunity when he encounters a newcomer, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Despite some awkward interactions, the two of them start spending time together, although Lee has much more invested in the relationship than Eugene does. Their hit-and-miss bond continues until Lee, who’s starting to get into drugs in addition to the booze, convinces Eugene to accompany him on a trip to South America.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Justin Kuritzkes (making their second straight film together after Challengers), early on the film seems to be mostly about the divide between an older person who’s grown comfortable in his ways and a younger person who’s living a relatively carefree life. The introduction of drugs into the plot changes things, though, with Lee searching out more ways to open his eyes to what the world has to offer.

Guadagnino and his team use some interesting visual storytelling techniques to introduce ideas that may not be present in the actual script. The most successful, demonstrated in multiple scenes, is the superimposition of movements by Lee over what’s actually taking place in the scene. The subtle overlay gives the audience insight into Lee’s true feelings, showing what he can’t or won’t say out loud.

Music also plays a big part in how the plot is perceived, with the use of anachronistic songs from Nirvana and Prince serving to heighten certain moments. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is not as in-your-face as the one they did for Challengers, but it complements the film well, especially when the plot starts to get trippy in its final half hour.

Craig, who appears sweaty and disheveled for much of the film, is about as far from the suaveness of James Bond as you can get in this role. He takes multiple risks with his performance and almost all of them pay off. Starkey’s character is subdued by comparison, but still comes off well. Schwartzman and Lesley Manville are given showy roles, with both using altered appearances that make them nearly unrecognizable to deliver memorable performances.

Queer is not as accessible as Challengers was storytelling-wise, but the fact that it tells a story about gay men living their lives as they see fit with no interference or questions shows how far the film world has come in a short period of time. It also continues Guadagnino’s streak of making audacious films in a way that few other filmmakers are willing or able to approach.

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Queer is now playing in theaters.

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