The best Christmas movies on Max (December 2023)

The 20th anniversary of Elf is too big to be contained by a single streaming service. Max and Hulu are both streaming the film this holiday season, which helped firmly establish former Saturday Night Live star Will Ferrell as a comedic leading man. Ferrell plays Buddy, a human who was raised by elves at the North Pole.

Since Buddy knows Santa and his elves are real, he takes offense to the way they are portrayed in New York City when he finally visits his biological father, Walter Hobbs (James Caan). The Hobbs family isn’t quite sure what to make of Buddy and his eccentricities, and neither is Jovie (New Girl‘s Zooey Deschanel), the beautiful young woman who catches Buddy’s eye.

The Polar Express exists in the rare gray area of being both visually stunning and off-putting at the same time, because the human characters aren’t as convincing as the CG backgrounds. Those were the limitations of performance capture animation at the time, when animators just didn’t have all of the tricks and advancements that they do now.

Regardless, director Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s children’s book The Polar Express has become a perennial favorite during the holiday season. Asteroid City‘s Tom Hanks lends his voice to several characters in the film, most notably the conductor of the Polar Express, a magical train heading directly for the North Pole that allows some lucky children to meet Santa Claus (Hanks) and have their Christmas wishes come true.