Josh and Netflix are not making this easy on me. When first asked to complete this list, I sent Josh a document with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in all five slots. He rejected this idea, but only on the grounds that the movie is not currently available for streaming on Netflix. To remedy this inadequacy, I recommend you get a hold of this film, starring a just barely pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. and a criminally underrated Michelle Monaghan, and watch it immediately. It will be your new favorite movie for a month. It has been my new favorite movie for eight years.

Even without this underrated classic (did I mention Val Kilmer is in it too?), everyone’s default favorite movie streaming service is missing several other Christmas and Christmas-adjacent (see Zack Handlen’s AV Club article for a working definition) classics as well. Netflix has not put up its Die Hard stocking this year. There’s no Home Alone 1 or 2 on the site. If you want Christmas Vacation or A Muppet Christmas Carol, you’re going to have to raid your parents’ basement cabinets for the VHS copies.

Instead, the movies listed under “Holiday Favorites” are mostly ABC Family-type dreck: romantic comedies thin on plot and laughs featuring heavy moralizing, sexually abstinent courtships, and obligatory cameos from Santa. These are movies that will be watched only by the most wholesome or brain-sappingly boring of families this holiday season. Actually, I have a hard time imagining even Ned Flanders sitting through movies with names like Christmas Town or Holidaze. It’s like someone produced them all solely for the purpose of some yuletide Netflix and chilling.

Myself, the only way I’m watching The Fitzgerald Family Christmas is if it’s about Zelda getting riggity-wrecked on wassail and telling F. Scott she imagines him as Hemingway when they’re boning.

So if you’d like your holidays to have any worthwhile Netflix in them, check these out.

1)    Love Actually

Does this movie embrace about seventeen different romantic-comedy clichés? Yes. Do any of the characters have an ounce of depth beyond that which the talented cast lends them? Not really. Does it sorta whitewash London into this snowglobe backdrop for upper-middle class citydwellers with cushy jobs to find love? Certainly. You betcha. To all these I say: I don’t give a flying[1].

Love Actually is a brilliantly paced, joy-filled whirlwind of a movie. It has pretty much all of Britain’s greatest middle-aged acting talent, from Emma Thompson to Severus Snape to the incomparable Liam Neesons. It is, at turns, laugh-out-loud funny and sexy and heartwarming and wrenchingly sad. It has an undeniably fun soundtrack. I defy you not to have the absolute damn pants charmed off you by at least one of the dozen plots and subplots. Watching this movie is like unwrapping the biggest present under the tree and realizing that, to your surprise, it completely lives up to the hype of being the biggest present under the tree.

Likelihood of me watching it drunk on eggnog Christmas Eve: 5/5

2)    The Nightmare Before Christmas

Is it a Christmas movie? Is it a Halloween movie? Is it a movie you can only watch starting before midnight on Halloween and finishing it by 1 AM? Again: who gives a flying[2]? Forget that embarrassing hat you bought from Hot Topic during your scenester phase in high school. Forget Tim Burton’s ongoing disservice to his early career (he didn’t actually direct this one anyway). Drink this one in for the lavish visuals and the even-darker-than-you-remember aesthetic. Like any great kids’ movie, this one only gets richer and more meaningful when you watch it in adulthood. (be sure to watch it with you pretentious grad school friends for a discussion of the film’s underlying themes of biological determinism afterward). For occasional Grinches like myself, Love Actually is the movie we watch when we want to remember why we love the holiday. The Nightmare Before Christmas is what we watch when we want to see it all burn down.

Chances of me singing along to “This Is Halloween” over the top of my empty Great Lakes Christmas Ale: ⅘

3)    White Christmas

Okay, so this one’s not that great, really. I feel like someone over at Paramount saw Singin’ in the Rain and said, “OK guys, we need to make that, but at Christmas, and with Not-Italian Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye.” Most of the songs feel embarrassingly dated, and Bing Crosby’s supposed charm comes off as sort of vanilla to me. The conflict, when it comes to a head in the third act, is so forehead-slappingly manufactured that the only relief you’ll feel when it’s resolved is that we’ve dispensed with the half-assed drama and can go back to the totally decent singing. The movie’s not totally without charm, I guess—there are some fun, elaborate dance scenes and some cute moments with George Clooney’s hot aunt—but I mostly put it on here in case you’d like something your grandparents will be stoked about and you and your cousins will reluctantly acquiesce to watching.

Odds I’ll burst out laughing at the start of the song “Snow” due to whiskey buzz: ⅖

4)    The Ice Harvest

I might be the only person who liked this movie. I might be the only person who’s seen this movie. Like Die Hard and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (again—see it) before it, this movie is Christmas-adjacent. It’s not about family or giving or finding thirtysomething romance. It’s a dark comedy heist caper—or really, a post-heist caper—that by the end is just straight-up dark. It was written by Richard Russo, one of my favorite novelists, a realist writer with an apparent soft spot for noir. It stars the still-likable John Cusack (we’re cheering for you, buddy) and features a great villainous turn from Billy Bob Thorton. Seriously, if you want to know how he got cast as the villain of Fargo’s first season, watch this movie. Speaking of Fargo the show, Oliver Platt gets a nice humorous role here as the drunk best friend.

I don’t know, guys, I could be wrong. This one could be as bad as critics, who either ignored or disliked it, say. It’s definitely flawed, but it’s good fun. And just wait till you see Randy Quaid, the most memorable performer of another Christmas favorite, come in as a “final boss” of sorts.

Odds of me pairing it with spiced wine and Grosse Pointe Blank for a Cusack double feature: 3/5

5)    Bad Santa & The Ref & Happy Christmas

All right, so, I haven’t actually seen any of these three, but I am considering watching them this year. I don’t know how I’ve missed Bad Santa. It has near cult-classic status. You should probably see it. I should probably see it. I’ll get back to you guys on this one.

The Ref is a dark comedy about burglar Denis Leary taking Kevin Spacey and his suburban wife hostage at Christmastime. I think Leary’s actually pretty underrated as an actor, even if he is a little one-note, and who doesn’t love them some Spacey?

Happy Christmas stars Anna Kendrick, and that girl is hot. Like, hottest girl in your improv class hot[3].

So that’s my early Christmas gift to you, Cinemateurs, minus the cop-out ending. I hope your holidays this year will be low-stress, financially feasible, and filled with wassail. Whatever that is.

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[1] Fuck, that is. A flying fuck. I’m trying to make this a thing, so if you’d do me a favor and try to make it catch on?

[2] Really, guys. Work with me on this one.

[3] Also, the movie is supposed to be smart and funny. So there is that.