To celebrate the beginning of December, film fans may well crack out their favourite to embrace the season.
With , like Home Alone, , It’s A Wonderful Life and , people often wonder what the best Christmas film is.
And it transpires that we may well have the answer thanks to review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
Having collated together approved critics’ thoughts on ever made, there is only one that has a full and perfect 100% rating, with no reviews skewing towards the negative.
The film in question is a traditionally popular choice for decades – which has also spawned one of the most sung Christmas songs too – and is Meet Me in St. Louis.
This may surprise younger movie enthusiasts, as it’s a musical that was released a whopping 80 years ago.
Meet Me in St. Louis isn’t necessarily a trendy choice, but its quality has meant it has clearly stayed admired through generations.
Starring Hollywood legend , and directed by Vincente Minnelli (who would go on to become her husband), the 1944 MGM film follows the fortunes of the upper-middleclass Smith family from summer 1903 to spring 1904 and the opening of the St. Louis World’s Fair.
Garland is second-oldest daughter Esther, in love with the boy next door, while Lucille Bremer and Margaret O’Brien play two of her sisters and Mary Astor and Leon Ames their parents.
A cosy tale where the greatest threat to anyone’s happiness is the chance the Smiths might have to leave Missouri for New York City, Meet Me in St. Louis provided comfort in Technicolor to cinemagoers during World War Two.
It has also remained a classic festive staple thanks to its abundance of well-known songs, from The Trolley Song and The Boy Next Door to the titular number and – of course – Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, all penned by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane.
Meet Me in St. Louis showed off at her best, remaining one of her most loved films alongside the likes of A Star is Born and Easter Parade.
‘Practically every member of the family from the 5-year-olds to grandma will find entertainment and fun’, praised the Boston Globe’s review of Meet Me in St. Louis at the time, while the Washington Star’s review from January 1945 proclaimed that the film ‘makes you glad just to be alive’.
‘It’s a picture that will bring tears to your eyes but send you away proud of them. It’s also a picture whose principal appeal hinges on a store of wonderful youthful memories which you probably thought you had forgotten,’ added journalist Patricia Simmons.
Jack Karr of the Toronto Daily Star in the 1940s also dubbed it ‘the technicolor musical to put all technicolor musicals to shame’, while Patrick Kirwan of the London Evening Standard mused that ‘it would be no bad thing to live in St. Louis all our lives especially if Miss O’Brien and Miss Garland were our neighbours’.
Modern critics have also heaped praise upon the movie, with ’s Peter Bradshaw calling it ‘an unmissable big-screen experience’ in 2011.
The film has also attracted over 25,000 verified audience member reactions, which overall put it on a very solid 87% Popcornmeter fan score.
‘Judy Garland at her best. A wonderful family film. We watch it every year,’ shared Stacy M alongside her five-star review, while Sandra N described it as ‘one of my all-time favourite movies’.
‘Meet Me in St. Louis is one of the most loving and charming family films of all time,’ agreed Evan L.
The films just behind Meet Me in St. Louis as the most highly rated X-mas flicks on Rotten Tomatoes are The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Oscar-winning from just last year and Sean Baker’s sex worker comedy-drama Tangerine, which may ruffle some feathers for being classified as a Christmas film.
There’s also the original Miracle on 34th Street from 1947, the 2019 version of Little Women and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
In terms of the highest-rated film on the list according to fan reviews, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is at the top with 97% – although, as it only came out in November in the US, and is not yet released in the UK, it is being boosted by ‘recent’ bias. It also has only around 1,000 fan reviews, which is a tiny fraction of that of Meet Me in St. Louis and many others.
The second-favourite is 2019 hand-drawn animation Klaus on Netflix, in which a desperate postman accidentally brings about the genesis of Santa Claus.
It has 96% from fans and 95% from critics.
