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

Billie Eilish takes fans behind the scenes in immersive 3D tour film

Photo by Henry Hwu/courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Billie Eilish in Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft - The Tour Live in 3D.

In 2021, at the tender age of 19, singer Billie Eilish was already the subject of a documentary, The World’s a Little Blurry. At that point, she had only released one album, so the film threatened to feel too early for such treatment. The ensuing five years have only made her a bigger star, though, so in many ways that movie now feels prescient for the person on display in the new concert documentary with the unwieldy title of Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft - The Tour Live in 3D.

Directed by Eilish and blockbuster filmmaker James Cameron, the film takes viewers inside Eilish’s 2024-2025 tour in support of her latest album, 2023’s Hit Me Hard and Soft. Filmed mostly at her series of shows in Manchester, England, the movie is a showcase for Eilish’s music, but it also serves as a smaller exploration of the type of person she is, as well as the impact she has had on her legion of fans.

The draw of the film is the use of Cameron’s beloved 3D technology, which he has employed in each of the three Avatar films. Unlike in those films, where the 3D has the odd effect of making the visuals too realistic for their own good, the technique brings an intimacy to the large-scale show that underscores the unique bond the singer has with her supporters.

Eilish and Cameron go back and forth between performances at the concert to behind-the-scenes sequences, detailing the enormous effort it takes to put on a show like that and how Eilish spends her time getting ready for it. As in The World’s a Little Blurry, this film continues to portray the singer as down-to-Earth, someone who yearns to maintain the connection to her fans that she’s had since she released her first single, “Ocean Eyes,” 10 years ago.

And as the many emotional songs in Eilish’s concert playlist prove, the feeling from the crowd is mutual. While Eilish has multiple bangers like “Bad Guy,” “Therefore I Am,” and the Charli XCX collaboration “Guess,” it’s the sad songs like “Everything I Wanted,” “Happier Than Ever,” and the Oscar-winning Barbie anthem, “What Was I Made For?” that hit the hardest. The depth of feeling emanating from her many sobbing fans singing along to crushing songs cannot be understated.

For audiences of the film, though, it’s the breadth of camera angles and shot choices that make it truly dynamic. There are cameras everywhere, including in the crowd, inside a cube at the center of the stage that rises and descends, following Eilish as she traipses every inch of the long, rectangular stage, and even a small one Eilish uses to bring an extra personal touch to the in-arena screen. Combined, they capture the complete energy of the concert, something that is not always the case in a film of this type.

Eilish has almost as many movies — two — as she does albums — three — which borders on overkill for a singer of her age. But both her music and the movies show her to be a person who knows the responsibility of being a celebrity, someone who understands that her fans are the reason she’s famous at all. Her career may go up or down from here, but it’s clear she’s already made a huge impact on those who love her most.

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Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft - The Tour Live in 3D opens in theaters on May 8.

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