These Christmas Movies Have a Perfect 100% Rating on Rotten Tomatoes

Reviews may not be a perfect measure of a movie’s quality, but they’re a good starting point – especially for genres that are meant to have a broad popular appeal, like Christmas movies. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has four Christmas movies with perfect 100 percent positive scores, and you may not have seen them all. They are: Meet Me in St. Louis, Holiday Inn, March of the Wooden Soldiers and Remember the Night.

Rotten Tomatoes compiles reviews from established film critics as well as user-submitted reviews. This year, the site published a list of its 100 top-rated Christmas movies for the holiday season, but only four of those have a 100 percent score on the “Tomatometer.” Below you’ll find a bit of info about each of those four movies, but it’s worth reviewing what exactly the scores mean first.

Rotten Tomatoes generally shows percentage scores for movies, but this is different from the actual rating of the movie itself. The site sorts all reviews into either positive or negative overall. If a movie has a 100 percent positive score on the Tomatometer, it means that every single critic gave the movie a generally positive review, but it doesn’t mean they all scored it a 10 out of 10. For example, Meet Me in St. Louis has a 100 percent positive score on the Tomatometer, but it has an average rating of 8.7 out of 10. The same is true on the user-submitted “Popcornmeter.” The percent tells you how many reviews were positive, while the average rating tells you what people thought of the quality.

With that in mind, we can consider all the factors that led to these four movies getting a 100 percent Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes. Read on for a bit about the highest-rated Christmas movies online.

Meet Me in St. Louis

At number one on Rotten Tomatoes’ list, Meet Me in St. Louis is 100 percent Fresh with an average rating of 8.7 out of 10. The audience was a little less generous, giving it an 87 percent positive score on the Popcornmeter. However, it still has an average rating of 4.2 out of 5. It’s worth noting that these scores and averages are only pulled from 28 film critics’ reviews, while over 25,000 users have submitted their own reviews for the Popcornmeter, so it’s unsurprising that there’s more variance there.

Meet Me in St. Louis debuted in 1944. It is a musical based on a novel by Sally Benson, directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Astor, Lucille Bremer, Tom Drake, Leon Ames, Marjorie Main, June Lockhart and Joan Carroll. It is set in St. Louis, Missouri in 1903 – the year before the Louisiana Purchase Exposition World’s Fair. It is broken up into four seasonal vignettes, starting in the summer of 1903, jumping ahead to Halloween, then Christmas Eve, and finally ending in the spring.

This movie is generally regarded as a precursor to the modern rom-com genre, as well as a coming-of-age story. The song and dance provide plenty of spectacle while the period-specific costumes and set pieces make it truly memorable. Meet Me in St. Louis is streaming now on Tubi, and is also available to rent or purchase on PVOD stores like Prime Video, Apple TV+ and Fandango at Home.

Holiday Inn

We have to jump ahead quite a bit to number 43 on Rotten Tomatoes’ list for the next 100 percent Fresh movie, Holiday Inn. Released in 1942, this is another musical comedy. Only eight critics’ reviews have been counted by Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 6.3 out of 10. Meanwhile, over 10,000 users have submitted their own reviews giving the movie an 86 percent positive score on the Popcornmeter, and an average rating of 4.2 out of 5.

The movie stars Bing Crosby as Jim Hardy, a song and dance performer who starts out in New York City performing with his fiance Lila (Virginia Dale) and his friend Ted (Fred Astaire). On Christmas Eve, Jim believes they are putting on their final show as a trio before he and Lila marry and move away to a farm in Connecticut. However, and Ted pull the rug out from under him, revealing that they are having an affair.

The lower ratings on this movie aren’t surprising if they’re coming from modern audiences and younger viewers. There are a lot of dated things in this movie that might be jarring, from Jim’s time in a sanatorium to the prominent use of blackface. An influx of new reviews for this movie might even drive the scores down, but Holiday Inn will hold its place in film history. If nothing else, it will always be the origin of the song “White Christmas,” written by composer Irving Berlin. You can stream Holiday Inn on Prime Video.

March of the Wooden Soldiers

The oldest movie on this list is March of the Wooden Soldiers, alternately titled Babes in Toyland, released in 1934. This musical was based on a stage play by Glenn MacDonough and Anna Alice Chaplin and stars Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and Charlotte Henry. Its 100 percent Fresh score comes from 16 critics who gave it an average rating of 8.3 out of 10. Over 2,500 user-submitted reviews give it a 78 percent score on the Popcornmeter with an average rating of 4 out of 5.

Christmas is certainly a time for tradition and nostalgia, but March of the Wooden Soldiers might be a tough sell for children today. The movie is in black and white, and its whimsical setting might struggle to compete with the cartoons that have come since. Still, it has managed to maintain its place in pop culture for nearly a century now, even airing on many broadcast TV stations every Thanksgiving and Christmas day.If you’re interested, you can stream the movie on Tubi.

Remember the Night

Finally, the 1940 holiday rom-com Remember the Night is 100 percent Fresh with an average rating of 7.9 out of 10 based on 12 verified critics’ reviews. It has an 84 percent positive score on the Popcornmeter, with only about 250 user-submitted reviews. Users gave it an average of 3.9 out of 5 stars.

Remember the Night stars Barbara Stanwyck as Lee Leander and Fred MacMurray as Jack Sargent. When Lee is arrested for stealing a bracelet from a jewelry store, Jack is the assistant district attorney assigned to prosecute her. Fearing that the holiday spirit will make the jury too sympathetic, Jack gets the trial postponed until after Christmas. However, he is then overcome with guilt himself when he realizes Lee will have to spend the holiday in jail. He posts her bail and offers her a ride back to Indiana, where they are both from and intend to spend the holidays with their respective families.

This odd couple is still fun to watch all these decades later, and their experience driving around the U.S. still hits surprisingly close to home. Remember the Night is a little tricky to track down for streaming, but it is available to purchase on DVD and Blu-ray. You can also watch it through the Internet Archive at the time of this writing.