You know Elf (2003) and Love Actually (2003), The Holiday (2006) and Die Hard (1988), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). But do you recall any of the most underrated Christmas movies of all?

Holiday cinema has become a remarkably rigid and reliable canon, and if you haven’t seen any of the golden age classics such as It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) or White Christmas (1954), then stop reading and start with those. But if you’re craving something a little less familiar this Christmas, here are a handful of off-the-beaten-path films worth revisiting.

Starring ’80s Saturday Night Live icons Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, Trading Places is a Christmas-set comedy about two men from radically different worlds — Aykroyd as a smug, well-heeled commodities trader (long before Patagonia vests and TikTok ruined the finance aesthetic) and Murphy as a charismatic street hustler — whose lives are manipulated for sport by a pair of corrupt, racially prejudiced oligarchs.

What begins as a class-switch farce becomes a sharp indictment of cronyism and elitism, culminating in one of the great comeuppances in American studio comedy. The film also preserves the old New York Stock Exchange trading floor: a roaring, chaotic coliseum of human excess before it was digitized and hollowed out by algorithms and high-frequency trading. What could be more American?

Trading Places is riotously funny and stacked with indelible gags,........

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