Christmas Movie Counterprogramming

There are Christmas movies, movies that aspire to fill viewers with
the Christmas spirit. And then there are movies that are set
during Christmas but would rather do something else with your
time. The canonical example of the first type of movie is It's A
Wonderful Life (1946); the canonical example of the second is
Die Hard (1988).

If you're sick of watching It's A Wonderful Life every year,
then mixing it up with Die Hard might be nice, but once you
open that door you've got a lot of additional possibilities, and
watching Die Hard every year just to stick it to Capra fans is
silly. As a public service, I've used IMDB data to find the top-rated
'Christmas' movies for use in your holiday counterprogramming.

I used an IMDB data dump (see postscript) to find every movie
tagged with the christmas keyword, excluding documentaries,
movies with 'Christmas' or 'Holiday' in the title, and movies in
Wikipedia's "American
Christmas Films" category. I went through what remained and picked
out films that were set as a whole over the Christmas holidays or otherwise had a pervasive Christmas element—a
lot of top movies like Goodfellas and Full Metal Jacket and Citizen Kane seem to only have one memorable Christmas scene. Here are all the
matching films with an IMDB rating of 8.0 or higher.


The Godfather (1972)
The Apartment (1960)
Pel��sky (1999)
Pl��cido (1961)
Jagten (2012)
The Thin Man (1934)
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
The King's Speech (2010)
Ma nuit chez Maud (1969)
In Bruges (2008)
C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
Brazil (1985)

If I wanted to watch a movie that fits this niche it would
definitely be The Apartment, and The Godfather is kind
of a marginal case, so I'm pretty happy with these results.

Postscript: unfortunately, IMDB changed their data format
recently to a format that is a lot easier to parse than what they had
before, but which is missing important pieces of information like
movie ratings and keywords, which makes a project like this impossible and renders the dataset as a whole nearly devoid of interest. It's been a fun ride, IMDB data
dumps. From Ghostbusters Past to Worst Best Picture to The MST3K-IMDB Effect to You Can't Be Serious to I Should Be In That Spoof to Where's that Golden Age? to Worst Episode Ever, the old, hacky, IMDB
dumps from an FTP site have provided me with quality data and my
readers with much entertainment.

But we all knew it was only a matter of time until someone at
Amazon said "Wait a minute..." and had a meeting with someone at
IMDB. So from this point on, all of my IMDB projects will use the last
full IMDB dump I got, for Ghostbusters Past in early 2015.