What to Watch After Christmas: The Best Movies to Stream During Your Holiday Hangover
Studies should be done (and probably have been done) on the time vortex that most of us fall into on the shapeless days between the 25th and 31st of December—and for most people in 2025, the weekend after that, too.
Knowing what to watch on those days can be a crucial decision, especially with family around: pick anything divisive, and you may run the risk of upsetting some already strained relationships; choose something too dull, and you run the risk of putting everyone, including yourself, to sleep.
The ideal post-Christmas/post-NYE hangover movie should be welcoming and, wherever possible, unprovocative. It should also have enough plot to keep people engaged, but not so much as to cause the elder members of the family, if present, to ask too many questions. A few, but not too many, should also threaten the tear ducts—as, let’s be honest, there are no other days in the year when we’re this emotionally relaxed and cosily sensitive to a pull of the heartstring.
Each movie that I’ve selected below should tick at least one of those boxes, some of them all four. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
When Netflix bought the Knives Out franchise for a gazillion dollars in 2021, it obviously had a plan for when it wanted to let one of its new crown jewels loose. Then, after the success of Don’t Look Up around Christmas of that year, it became very clear when most people gathered around the TV in search of some comedic brain candy to chew on.
The first Netflix entry in the series, Glass Onion, was sadly a bit of a disappointment—one of those self-aware sequels that proves a bit too self-aware for its own good—but this third instalment, Wake Up Dead Man, is a return to form. If you appreciate a good murder mystery (Clue, Murder on the Orient Express), this one will keep the sitting room locked-in for more than two hours.
Another recent release that offers an engaging concept, light humour, but also a good dose of old-school romance is the new A24 movie Eternity, which is also, fittingly, a good name for the week between Christmas and New Year's. This is the one where Elisabeth Olsen and Miles Teller play a couple who die and meet again in the afterlife, only for the Olsen character’s first husband—a hunk (Callum Turner) who died in the war—to appear.
This turn of events creates an unlikely love triangle, prompting her to have to choose between two ideas of happiness: the actual one she had and the one who got away. It’s a delightful, charming and occasionally moving film that boasts the high concept of a Pixar movie, like Inside Out, along with the big, romantic swings of classics like A Matter of Life and Death. It also features Da’vine Joy Randolph in her first major role since winning an Oscar for the next movie on our list.
If you are feeling a bit cooped up in a claustrophobic space, perhaps surrounded by moody teenagers—or at least adults who are quickly regressing into a similar state—Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is the movie for you. In my opinion, most Christmas movies should go back into a locked safe as soon as the clock strikes midnight on Christmas night, but Payne’s film begins on the 22nd and saves most of its emotional epiphanies for the days around New Year's Eve, making it a perfect watch for those in-between days.
Payne’s melancholic and dryly funny brand of cinema (Nebraska) is usually a treat, and this one’s no different. It also features the great Paul Giamatti, so if you’re a Sideways fan, you know what to do.
If you like humour, heartache, and Cary Mulligan singing folk tunes in close harmony, the 2025 release The Ballad of Wallis Island is going to feel like a hug from that friend you haven’t seen in a while. If some family members are starting to get a little tetchy, put this one on, and in roughly an hour and a half, they’ll probably find they have something in their eye.
If you grew up in the ‘00s, you’ll feel a twinge of nostalgia and perhaps be slightly jarred to see a film use Mumford (aka Mr Cary Mulligan) and Sons-era stomp-and-shout indie as a retro device, but that won’t get in the way of your enjoyment here. Fans of the recent sitcom The Paper will also get a nice kick out of Tim Key’s touching performance.
Let’s throw a classic in. This is another title, like Eternity, that has a way of summing up the feeling of life between the 26th and 31st, when every meal seems to consist of sliced turkey, and the temptation to have a drink before 2 pm is all too real. We’re talking, of course, about the Harold Ramis/Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day, a title so influential it has since entered the common lexicon.
The movie follows Murray’s arrogant weatherman, Phil Connors (and if you love the actor’s early run of Ghostbusters and Scrooged, you’ll love this), on a journey towards self-understanding that involves repeating the same day ad-infinitum. I once read that the movie’s script suggests that Conners stays in the loop for 10,000 years, which gives the movie a feeling of cosmic futility that we can all probably relate to during our post-Christmas hangovers.
If you included Joe Dante’s first Gremlins movie in your Christmas watching this year, I highly recommend throwing on Gremlins 2: The New Batch in the days that follow. Critics didn’t quite know what to make of it at the time, but Dante’s follow-up has only gained in popularity since then and has become a true cult classic.
This is the one where the scaly critters take over a newly erected skyscraper in New York, causing chaos wherever they go. For the sequel, Dante and his legendary creature designer Chris Walas (who also worked on The Fly and Naked Lunch) threw every idea they could think of at the wall—up to and including introducing a flirty female Gremlin, a horrifying spider hybrid and, best of all, an intellectual.
Like with Dante’s Gremlins, if you already enjoyed your annual festive rewatch of Die Hard 1 and 2, what better time to throw on the underappreciated Die Hard with a Vengeance? This is the one where Bruce Willis runs around New York defusing bombs with Samuel L. Jackson, and the villain, played by Jeremy Irons, wears a baby blue vest and speaks with a German accent.
By switching to the summer months, the movie never got the annual rotation enjoyed by its predecessors, but it’s a great rec for fans of classic buddy cop movies like Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs.
If one of the post-Christmas days is looking especially devoid of plans, why not dive into a full-on epic? When it comes to the festive season, it’s hard to do much better than Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. You can even just put on the first instalment, The Fellowship of the Ring, and see how it goes down before continuing—it’s such a perfectly contained film that it’ll satisfy whoever’s watching, regardless of whether you finish the saga or not.
This is one for the fantasy fans in the family, especially (think Percy Jackson, Narnia), and one that slightly younger family members can also get involved with.
Speaking of younger audiences, here’s one that’ll please just about anyone in the house—pets included. According to our metrics, the hugely successful Zootopia 2 has been inspiring viewers to revisit the original ever since the sequel began packing out cinemas at the beginning of December. These post-Christmas days could hardly be better suited for it: this is a movie that will delight the kids while giving the adults (and even the grandparents) some classic movie and TV references (think Godfather, Breaking Bad) to enjoy.
The story, which follows a bunny from the countryside who hopes to become a police officer in an animal-run metropolis, also packs a decent message about prejudice and a good dose of emotion to go along with all its action and humour. You can’t go wrong.
If you’re looking for something fresh, funny and action-packed that will also get you informed for the fast-approaching awards season, why not try Paul Thomas Anderson’s new-to-streaming masterpiece One Battle After Another—one of the most enjoyable “Best of the Year” movies in ages. This one won’t be for younger members of the family, but it’ll offer all kinds of excitement, humour, and engagement for anyone with a slightly sore head.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up revolutionary whose daughter is kidnapped by an old rival, played by a rarely better Sean Penn. If you like Anderson’s movies, like Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, it’s a must-see.
