Sorry about the delay! Today, we're beginning our series on holiday films with everyone's favorite sorta kinda Christmas movie, Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan.

We all know the story - a group of well-heeled European terrorists-turned-thieves take over an LA skyscraper during a Christmas party, and it's up to one good cop on the loose in the building to muck up their plans. The story itself is well-trodden territory, but there's novelty in the protagonist, a fallible and vulnerable everyday cop who finds himself in an extraordinary situation, during an era in which action movie heroes were more commonly super-human killing machines.

Everything about Die Hard just works. It's every action movie cliche working in perfect synchronicity. It's the film that would be shown if aliens landed on Earth and inexplicably asked what a Hollywood action movie is. It turned Bruce Willis into a bonafide movie star out of nowhere, gave us one of Hollywood's most indelible villains in Hans Gruber (an incomparable Alan Rickman), and spawned a whole genre of copycat movies over the next couple decades (including four direct sequels). And at the center of it all is Nakatomi Plaza itself, the building becoming a central character in the film. Nearly the entire movie takes place within its walls, and the audience becomes intimately familiar with the building's layout throughout the film's runtime. It's one of the most memorable locations in recently Hollywood cinema, and appropriately took center stage in the film's marketing campaign.