If holiday films were a drop in the ocean then you’d be drowning from all of the cheesy Christmas movies on Amazon Prime Video. There’s apparently a Christmas film for every occasion, and not all of them are good or even watchable.
Prime Video isn’t the only streamer to suffer from this issue, but it does better than most because it still has access to some legitimately great Christmas movies including It’s a Wonderful Life and Scrooged. This year, Christmas rom-coms Love Actually and The Holiday are both part of Prime Video’s library and easily among the top choices to stream this holiday season. You can find these films and more among the best Christmas movies on Amazon Prime Video right now.
Looking for more holiday picks? We’ve also assembled guides to the best Christmas movies on Netflix and the best Christmas movies on Hulu.
Richard Curtis’ Love Actually is definitely a Christmas movie, it’ just also about ten different rom-coms smashed into a single film. Critics weren’t very kind to it, but audiences have warmed to it as a Christmas classic. Fair warning: You may need a flow chart to keep track of all of the different romances in the film, and how they intersect. The immediate attraction between stand-ins John (Martin Freeman) and Judy (Joanna Page) is one of the notable subplots, as is the slow burn attraction between the Prime Minister, David (Heretic‘s Hugh Grant), and Natalie (Martine McCutcheon), a member of the staff at 10 Downing Street. But the most memorable story in our opinion, is the one focusing on a grieving widower named Daniel (Liam Neeson), and his stepson, Sam (Thomas Sangster), who is smitten with an American girl Joanna (Olivia Olson).
Hallmark Holiday movie filmmakers probably wish they could pull off romantic comedies like The Holiday did. It certainly helps to have the right cast. A British woman named Iris Simpkins (Kate Winslet) and an American woman, Amanda Woods (Back in Action‘s Cameron Diaz), have had their hearts broken too many times. Although the two ladies are strangers to each other, they agree to swap houses for the holidays.
Amanda quickly meets Iris’ brother, Graham Simpkins (Jude Law), and falls hard for him. Meanwhile in America, Iris finds herself connecting with a more unconventional guy, Miles Dumont (Jack Black). There’s a real love connection between both couples, but can their newfound romance live beyond the holiday season?
The Man Who Invented Christmas’s title might be giving Charles Dickens (Abigail‘s Dan Stevens) too much credit, but he really did play a major role in how we celebrate the holiday season. That’s how much influence Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has had over the last 180 years. This particular film dramatizes Dickens’ life when he struggles to write his next story before coming face-to-face with his own creation: Ebenezer Scrooge (Christopher Plummer).
The visions of Scrooge and other characters from A Christmas Carol may not be real, but the emotions they bring out of Dickens force him to reconsider his story and his relationship with his own family. From there, a classic novel is born.
Scrooged is basically A Christmas Carol, but modernized and played more for laughs with Bill Murray in the leading role as Frank Cross, a Scrooge-like network executive at the IBC Television network. On Christmas Eve, Frank forces his employees to work on A Christmas Carol broadcast while giving them chintzy gifts for Christmas.
In other words, Frank is a perfect candidate for some Christmas Carol magic to find any humanity under his sleazy exterior. The Ghost of Christmas Past (David Johansen), the Ghost of Christmas Present (Carol Kane), and the Ghost of Christmas Future (Robert Hammond) are really going to have their hands full trying to convince Frank to change.
Michileen Martin has written about pop culture in general and comics in particular for two decades. His work has appeared in numerous sites including Looper, PopMatters, Popdose, and nerdbastards.com. He probably knows more about the Incredible Hulk than you.
Nick Perry is a freelance writer who bounced from Hollywood to Silicon Beach to pajama pants. His work has been featured on Digital Trends, Good Morning America, Entrepreneur, Mashable, and more media outlets.
Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek Monthly, SYFY Wire, Superhero Hype, Collider, DC Universe, and the official sites for Star Trek and Marvel. He also lends his pop culture expertise to Digital Trends on a variety of TV, movie, and streaming features.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.