From a John Cusack 80s teen comedy to the other Frank Capra Christmas crowd-pleaser, here are some seasonal picks you might not have seen

Something that bugs me about a lot of contemporary Christmas movies is how insistently self-conscious they are about the whole production – the ostentatious decorations, checklist of soundtrack chestnuts, the dialogue about the true meaning of the holidays that sounds canned even when the movie is trying to acknowledge its various stressors. Maybe because the idea of a holiday movie hadn’t yet ossified into routine, I’ve found that the versions of these films that came out in the 1940s tend to approach Christmas from more inventive, less neurotically obsessive angles. One of my favorite discoveries in sifting through 1940s Christmas comedies is It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a 1947 semi-romantic farce with a great starting hook: a cheerful vagrant Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) winters in New York every year, because he knows a way into a particular Fifth Avenue mansion seasonally vacated by its enormously wealthy owner. One winter, Aloysius invites some new acquaintances to stay with him: veteran Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) and his military buddies, plus runaway Trudy O’Connor (Gale Storm) – who is secretly the daughter of the mansion’s owner. Eventually, the owner himself is forced to disguise himself as another vagrant and stay in the house, too, so Trudy can make sure Jim loves her on her own merits. This all takes place during the run-up to Christmas and into New Year’s, and director Roy Del Ruth gives the movie a found-family warmth that newer holiday movies have to labor two or three times as hard for, assembling a funny and lovable surrogate family in one of the city’s well-appointed empty spaces. Speaking of labor: It Happened on Fifth Avenue lands perfectly between class-conscious social picture about the importance of affordable housing and romantic urban fairytale. Jesse Hassenger

It Happened on Fifth Avenue is available on Plex and to rent digitally in the US, UK and Australia

The 2016 drama, loosely inspired by the father-son relationship, is a gritty drama about addiction that has now become a puzzle piece

Being Charlie, a 2016 movie directed by the late Rob Reiner, stands out from the director’s filmography for a number of reasons. It’s a gritty and grounded addiction movie with a few comic elements, less ebullient than many of the movies Reiner was famous for, as well as the others he was making in the 2010s. It features then-up-and-coming stars, rather than more established figures, and way more sex and nudity than usual. And it’s the only movie co-written by Reiner’s son, Nick, whose experiences formed the basis for the screenplay, and who is now expected to be charged in the murder of both his parents.

Those horrific circumstances transform Being Charlie from one of Reiner’s more interesting late-period efforts into the subject of unavoidable rubbernecking. Here is a film Reiner made in collaboration with his son, in part as an obvious act of hope that the worst of his struggles would prove to be behind him. Real life was not quite so cooperative as the open-ended but vaguely optimistic resolution of a well-intentioned indie drama.