The Ultimate Movie Lover’s Gift Guide

Movies are best seen in a well-equipped theater, where every piece of the presentation—the sight, the sound, the sensation—is primed to sweep you up in cinema’s thrall. Not every theater is well-equipped, though, and not all of us have the luck of living near those that are. Between that, the high cost of going to the movies, occasionally appalling behavior among other viewers, and the limited options beyond new releases, you may find the home experience more to your liking. 

If you have a movie lover in your life, you have an embarrassment of gift options to feed that enthusiasm, and make watching movies in the comfort of your house that much more satisfying. Here are our ten favorite gift ideas for all the movie buffs out there.

Movie lovers love Christmas movies. They love bickering about what belongs to the Christmas movie canon; every holiday season of every year sparks the reignition of the Die Hard argument, even though Bruce Willis himself set that record straight at his own roast back in 2018. Gremlins, on the other hand, is a Christmas movie, and since Christmas falls on colder months, Jimmy Lion’s Athletic Gremlins sock pack checks off two boxes at once: Acknowledging the film’s holiday status, and keeping your feet nice and cozy. (Movie lovers hate chilly toes.)

Buy at Jimmy Lion

Speaking of cold: Movie lovers hate chilly legs and arms too, and though they’re often the breed of people capable of tolerating the cramped dimensions of the average movie theater’s seating, they’d rather be comfy. Leave that to L.L. Bean; this blanket doesn’t mess around when it comes to softness and warm vibes. Grant that it’s not the done thing to bring blankets with you to the multiplex, so the Sherpa Throw will do its best work on your couch.

Buy at L.L. Bean

Now that you’re all settled in for movie-watching, you need something to play movies with. The key to a solid home video setup is a solid Blu-ray player, and dollar for dollar, there’s none better than Panasonic’s DP-UB820. There are more expensive ones; the DP-UB9000 runs more than twice the cost of the UB-820 with significant diminishing returns for the price jump, mostly in audio features. Stick with the DP-UB820: You’ll get the absolute best video quality and features for your dollar, plus compatibility with major high dynamic range (HDR) video formats—see: Dolby Vision and HDR10+—and compatibility with Dolby ATMOS and DTS:X soundtracks. The cake topper is the HDR Optimizer function. If your TV’s brightness is on the lower end, this nifty little feature will tune your video output to complement its luster. 

Buy at Panasonic

A Blu-ray player alone won’t let you see John McClane kick German radical butt at a Christmas Eve party. You need a screen. You could go with a TV and call it “good,” but for the home theater effect, you’ll want a projector. And if you want a projector, BenQ’s HT2060 hits the spot. It’s user friendly, and so suits the experience levels of both projector nerds and newbies; the image contrast and color accuracy are so damn good that you can plug this in out of the box and get a great presentation without having to fiddle with the settings much if at all. Better still, the LED bulb will last the life of the projector itself, so you’ll never have to change it. Bonus.

Buy at Adorama

Now that you have the visual side all set, it’s time to focus on the audio side. There are two downsides to VIZIO’s Elevate SE: It’s a little tricky to set up, and it’s somewhat primitive in terms of inputs and support—no WiFi, only Bluetooth, one HDMI eARC jack and nothing else. (There’s no remote control, either, but there’s a mobile app for that, and thankfully, that’s user-friendly.) What you gain from those sacrifices, though, is a level of sound quality that handily outpaces competing soundbars, with a clarity to dialogue that’s particularly noteworthy. If Dolby Atmos or DTS:X is in play, the speakers adjust by rotating toward your ceiling—bouncing the sound off its surface, for a nifty “in a movie theater, but really it’s my basement” effect.

Buy at Best Buy

Lights. Sound. Screens. Next: Snacks. Unless you chose poorly as a teen and worked at one of the big chain multiplexes for gas money, where the popcorn leftover at the end of every day is dumped into industrial trash bags, tossed on a high shelf in a closet, and then sold the next day, popcorn is your go-to for a munchie at the movies. Problem: The kid selling you stale popcorn over the concession counter doesn’t have a booth in your kitchen. Solution: Your very own popcorn popper. Popsmith’s poppers make you popcorn in mere minutes, with a spinner to avoid burning kernels, and the whole shebang is dishwasher safe.

Buy at Popsmith

The best home theater gear in the world adds up to a lot of nothin’ if you don’t have anything to watch. We’re in the streaming age, where we have all of the things to watch, and yet nothing to watch, all at once; what a time to be alive. Most movie buffs have subscriptions to all the standards—Netflix, Hulu, Max—and they’re almost certain to have a Criterion Channel account; if they kvetch about how “there’s never anything good on,” give them a MUBI subscription. Between finely curated collections of classics and new must-watches, there’s a wealth of material to dive into, with an emphasis on the best that modern international cinema has to offer—like Omen, and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World—as well as gonzo genre cinema like the Cannes-winning Demi Moore vehicle The Substance.

Learn more at Mubi

On the other hand: Streaming is great, but physical media is forever. 2024 overflows with new Blu-ray and 4K releases that each could be argued to be essential for any movie buff’s shelf, but it’s Christmas: Go with the mother of ’em all, CC40, the Criterion Collection’s box set colossus, bursting with films in their 40-year-old library. The reminder of Criterion’s age is a trip unto itself. The sheer scale of excellence in the set, though, is a journey. In the Mood for Love. On the Waterfront. All That Jazz. Bicycle Thieves. Naked. Do the Right Thing. House. The Night of the Hunter. Ratcatcher. Tokyo Story. Masterpieces all, and you only have so many hours in a day to plug through them.

Buy at Criterion

If titanic box sets are a little too rich for your blood, a single 4K might be in order, and there may be no release this year that’s as urgent a purchase as Blazing Saddles. You could wonder why Warner Bros. took as long as it has to put out Mel Brooks’ first 1974 classic in a modern format, or you could accept the mystery and snatch a copy. (His second 1974 classic, of course, is Young Frankenstein.) It’s a common lament (even from Brooks!) that Blazing Saddles wouldn’t get funding today, because the movie industry is too PC; recall that 50 years ago, the film’s producers pushed him to cut all of the jokes about race and ethnicity, plus the campfire fart scene, among others. (Brooks famously said yes to their notes, then went ahead and ignored them.) Truth is, this is a timeless film. Even in 2024, PC though we may be, the jokes land as precisely as its social commentary.

Buy at Amazon

A book of film criticism structured around a Christian lens may sound like dry reading, but Abby Olcese’s wonderful, thoughtful text is nothing like one would expect from the brief. It’s fun. It’s sharp. It’s surprising, which is frankly a great achievement in modern film criticism; would you read Greta Gerwig’s Barbie in the spirit of Epiphany, or James Mangold’s Logan as a story about Lent? Have you ever considered the connection that Paddington and Paddington 2 share with Advent for even a second? You don’t need to be an observant Christian to find the relationships Olcese draws between the liturgical seasons—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Ascension Day, Pentecost, All Saints Day—and the movies she pairs them with (which include The Last Jedi, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Bishop’s Wife, and Joyeux Noel, to name a few others) to be compelling, meaningful, or delightfully unexpected.

Buy at Barnes & Noble