The 20 best Christmas movies of all time – readers' picks

What did Monitor readers choose as the best Christmas movie (or TV special) of all time?

8. 'Love Actually'

Peter Mountain/Universal Studios
'Love Actually' stars Alan Rickman (l.) and Laura Linney (r.).

Richard Curtis's 2003 film follows various Londoners during the holiday season as they struggle with love, including the prime minister (Hugh Grant) of the country who has a crush on his secretary and a widower (Liam Neeson) trying to figure out how to move forward in the aftermath of his wife's death.

The song which pop star Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) performs during the movie is a slightly altered version of the Troggs song "Love Is All Around."

"Mad Men" actress January Jones appears as one of the women Colin (Kris Marshall) meets when he travels to the US and goes to a bar in Wisconsin.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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