Critic, schmitic. How can you pretend to be engaged in objective aesthetic appraisal when you’re talking about movies that you first watched decades ago in your childhood living room, while your late mother was trimming the tree and your long-dead dad was setting up the Nativity scene? The feeling that washes over you the moment the opening credits begin has relatively little to do with these movies’ actual merits, if any. Of course they get to you: They’re part of what shaped you; they’re artifacts of the long-vanished era in which you grew up; like Proust’s bite of madeleine, they trigger tsunamis of precious memory; like attending a midnight Mass on Christmas Eve or a Yuletide performance of the Messiah, watching them is a cherished ritual, carrying meaning through time and underscoring the irretrievable nature of the past even as they make the past feel, briefly, just a bit less irretrievable.

Take Meet Me in St. Louis — which, mind you, was already a nostalgia piece when it came out in 1944. It tells the charming, lightly plotted story of a nice upper-middle-class St. Louis family during the run-up to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. It gives us Judy Garland, as Esther Smith, belting out “The Trolley Song,” crooning “The Boy Next Door,” and — in the film’s centerpiece, which is what qualifies it as a Christmas movie — introducing the all-time favorite “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The major conflict, such as it is, involves the question of whether the paterfamilias (Leon Ames), a banker, will accept a promotion that would compel his wife and children, against their wishes, to move with him to New York — and thereby miss the exposition. Anyone remotely familiar with the cinematic formulas of the day knows that none of them will ever leave town. Indeed, the film ends at the exposition, where Esther, taking in the glorious spectacle with her parents and siblings, delivers the film’s closing line: “I can’t believe it! Right here where we live — r...