AVQ&A: What's your favorite uncomfortable holiday movie?

This delightfully abrasive family dramedy/romantic comedy inspired me to pose this question to my colleagues. Plenty of films capture the mixed blessing that is going home for the holidays, but Thomas Bezucha’s 2005 film combines those tensions with the ones that arise when meeting the parents. Diane Keaton and Rachel McAdams team up as the future in-laws from hell, with the rest of Everett Stone’s (Dermot Mulroney, who also enjoys this Christmas treat’s tartness) family showing different levels of wariness in their appraisal of his girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker). The Family Stone then piles on the awkwardness and indignities before culminating in a double sibling swap (take that, While You Were Sleeping). It’s a prickly affair,  guaranteed to add texture to any holiday movie marathon. I show it to my family every year, hoping they’ll eventually see that we are The Family Stone: insular and hyperjudgmental.  [Danette Chavez]

Christmas at the Kubricks’ must’ve been a trip. Director Stanley Kubrick’s swansong, Eyes Wide Shut, is a Christmas movie about a man unwrapping the psychosexual fears festering at the core of his being. Starring then-power-couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Kubrick lays bare the insecurities lingering behind Cruise’s deeply guarded moviestar persona, turning his outward confidence into a mask of repressed desire and masculine uncertainty. Cruise plays Dr. Bill Harford, a well-to-do man about town who is introduced to the debaucherous lives of New York power players and wants in. As he falls down the rabbit hole, he crashes a masquerade orgy, and his sexual insignificance consumes him. Set in Kubrick’s hermetically sealed, golden-hued fairy tale of New York, Eyes Wide Shut has many of the trimmings of a Christmas movie, but Kubrick delivers something darker, stranger, and more allusive. It’s a Christmas Carol, of sorts, a reckoning with the self that only the Yuletide can provide. [Matt Schimkowitz]

On the most basic level, Home Alone should be a horror movie: tired, harried parents accidentally leave their young boy at home before heading on vacation. That same kid then has to defend himself from two thieves who break in. Implausible as it may be, Home Alone turns this concept into a comforting Christmas classic. (And this happens not just once, but twice with its New York-set sequel). The credit mostly goes to Macaulay Culkin’s wildly cute performance. Yeah, I’m going to believe an eight-year-old came up with all those ideas and booby traps, and managed to defeat Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, because of how convincingly Culkin pulls it off. The movie’s cringe humor and cheesy message aren’t exactly what make it a great holiday classic. [Saloni Gajjar]

I’m far from the only person to point out that Love Actually is an uncomfortable movie, but it bears repeating that a movie that so quickly and immediately entered the holiday movie canon is A Bit Fucked Up, Actually! Of course, the film endures precisely because so many of its vignettes are built on sad, awkward, or questionable premises. But since this holiday rom-com is so beloved, some of its rougher edges seem to have been sanded down in the cultural consciousness. Andrew Lincoln’s cue-card declaration of love, for instance, has become an iconic romantic image, but its many parodies lack what makes the original so compelling: Mark’s confession to his best friend’s wife is not only doomed, it’s totally inappropriate. It requires a complete balance of movie magic (great casting, acting, directing, writing, etc.) to pull that moment off, let alone have it become synonymous with Christmas rom-coms for all time. [Mary Kate Carr]

“Merry Christmas, bitch.” So Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) toasts Alexandra (Mya Taylor), a fellow transgender sex worker, in Sean Baker’s inspired, wildly entertaining, iPhone-shot masterpiece. Unfolding over one incredibly hectic Christmas Eve, everything feels like it’s on a razor’s edge as the duo rushes through an authentically grimy slice of Hollywood and its sun-faded donut shops, laundromats, and fleabag motels in search of Sin-Dee’s shitty boyfriend Chester (The Wire’s James Ransone). But things get particularly uncomfortable when regular john/cab driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian) and his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law come face to face with his other life near Tangerine’s end. This is a Christmas, certainly, that none of these characters will ever forget. [Tim Lowery] 

We welcome Gotham’s own Santa Claus…Max Shreck. Thus does Batman Returns damn itself as an utterly inappropriate Christmas movie, with Christopher Walken’s warped mogul as its Trump-by-way-of-Beethoven figurehead. It’s not just that Shreck is a nasty guy, but that Tim Burton fills his whole Christmas-tinged sequel with tragic mutants, pent-up vigilantes, and psychosexual freakouts. It’s a holiday favorite, just a bit more prickly (and therefore fun and interesting) than the palatable four-quadrant blockbusters of modern superheroism. As an adult, it’s a totally normal watch (as far as prime Burton films go), but as a kid watching with your parents, it’s a bit uncomfortable for reasons you don’t quite understand. Rarely does a Christmas movie have you saying “I hope this doesn’t awaken anything in me.” And yet, after all the horny Gothic cartoonishness, it ends with Christmas wishes, exchanged between found family members. Wholesome! [Jacob Oller]

This one feels a bit like cheating since it’s supposed to be uncomfortable, but Chevy Chase’s Clark Griswold has aged so poorly it feels like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation has boomeranged around to fitting this prompt all over again. The not-so-jolly patriarch is mean, abrasive, and misogynistic beyond the point of parody, but hell if it isn’t funny to watch him fail over and over and over again. Whether he’s losing a road-rage dick measuring contest to the undercarriage of an 18-wheeler, crashing through the floor of the attic, or going to war with an enemy squirrel, Clark remains a beacon for those who like to enjoy a little schadenfreude with their cookies and egg nog. Plus, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ turn in this as the Griswold’s long-suffering, and constantly sunglassed neighbor is one for the ages. Merry Christmas, kiss my ass! [Emma Keates]

Todd Haynes’ Carol is achingly beautiful and colored like a memory. But watching it, at least for the first time, was so uncomfortable for me because I spent most of the movie’s runtime waiting for the other shoe to drop. Carol (Cate Blanchett) and Therese (Rooney Mara) spend much of the film more or less on the run with angry male partners, social ostracization, and a punitive legal system threatening to end their affair (and, eventually, successfully doing so). Carol is simply depicting that unfortunate reality for queer women in the 1950s, so watching it in hindsight, we know the good time isn’t going to last. But that doesn’t make their holiday any less worthwhile. [Drew Gillis]