Thanksgiving is over, and now it’s time to celebrate Christmas. Oh, you don’t celebrate Christmas, well too bad because CHRISTMAS IS AMERICA. BUY SOME DAMN GIFTS, DAMMIT. Saying that Christmas rules over everything in the holiday season is perhaps an understatement of epic proportions. The number of Hanukkah-themed movies are few, and there aren’t any Hanukkah-themed horror movies for me to enjoy…unless you count Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights, which many sane people consider a horror.

Still, there are many Christmas movies to enjoy in the holiday season, and few are more heartwarmingly cynical than 1994’s The Ref. Pitting Denis Leary against Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis, The Ref tells a holiday tale of a thief on the lam who takes a troubled family hostage on Christmas Eve. Spacey and Davis are a dysfunctional couple whose marriage is on the rocks following an affair caused by the financial stress of the previous generation (sound familiar?). When Leary is caught off-guard by a booby-trapped burglar alarm, he takes them hostage even as their extended family is coming to celebrate, forcing him to act as a marriage counselor until he can make his getaway.

Davis, Leary, and Spacey all do valiant work fighting over the spotlight, while Glynis Johns (Mary Poppins) does stellar work as the matriarchal tyrant and Christine Baranski as the sister-in-law who is the new ball-busting matriarch in waiting. The screenplay shines throughout, as The Ref is chock full of instant quotables (“The spirit of Christmas is either you’re good, or you’re punished and burn in hell.”), and Leary gets a couple of his then-trademark rants in for good measure (really, Leary was one of the Rant Masters in the 90s).

The Ref streams on Netflix.