Ho, ho, ho, boys and girls! Has everyone been nice and not naughty? Really? You mean it? You wouldn't kid the BQ, would you?
Okay then.....here's a quick roundup of a few of the 3 million Christmas movies you can choose from......starting with....
Oh.What.Fun. (Prime 2025)
As we well know, nothing aggravates the already cracked foundations of large families like Christmas. (Particularly upper middle class clans who gather in beautifully spacious houses that none of us could ever hope to afford.....but that's show-biz, folks....)
Mama Bear Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer), a world weary underappreciated and Krazy-For-Christmas Mom, is frazzled and frenzied as she prepares for the holiday gathering of her three grown children.
But each in their own way, the kids, (Felicity Jones, Chloe Grace Moretz, Dominic Sessa) are so caught up in themselves, they ignore all Claire's hints to nominate her for Best Holiday Mom on her favorite talk show.
Forgetting to take her along (a la 'Home Alone') to a Christmas concert she bought them all tickets for......well, that's the last straw. Claire hits the road for comical misadventures, including crashing the talk show's big presentation of the Holiday Mom award. Holly jolly laughs and pathos ensue....supposedly.
Terrific cast, led by superstar Pfeiffer, puts it all out there, but co-writer and director Michael Showalter strains for laughs when tossing his star into ludicrous zany situations. (He has Claire impulsively shoplift a large serving bowl in the middle of a crowded mall, touching off her duel and escape from an army of security guards. Dumb, dumb, dumb and so stupidly out of character.....)
The movie sure moves along, though and sometimes earns the heartwarming chuckles it sweats candy canes to deliver. 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).
My Secret Santa (Netflix 2025)
This one bets everything on the adorable charm of its star Alexandra Breckinridge ('Virgin River', 'This is Us') and she works overtime to deliver a Christmas bauble worth sitting through.
A holiday themed mash-up of "Tootsie" and "Mrs. Doubtfire", Breckinridge plays harried single mom Taylor.....recently fired and fending off her aggressive landlady's demands for overdue rent. Oh and did we mention her teen daughter wants to take snowboarding instruction at a posh winter resort?
Naturally she does what you'd expect every Christmas Mom would do....desperate for employment and money to pay her kid's snowboarding bill, she disguises herself as 'Hugh Mann' (get it? get it?) a perfect Santa actor, courtesy of a fat suit and expert disguise provided by her makeup artist brother.
And of course, she/he is hired by the winter resort's hoodwinked fledgling manager Matthew (Ryan Eggold), a reformed playboy pressured into forced hospitality servitude by his father, the resort's owner. Even though the new Santa's a man, somehow the jolly St. Nick reminds Matthew of that girl he tried to date the previous day in an unsuccessful meet-cute. (Guess who that girl was/is? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?)
Taylor/Hugh's faux Santa is a bust at first, bumming kids out with tough practical advice gleaned from her own paycheck-to-paycheck existence. But under Matthew's uh...kind attention, she switches to offering children warm and wise homilies to grown on and before you know it, a Santa star is born.
And bring on the holiday wackiness, as Taylor/Hugh simultaneously races between playing Hugh-as-Santa and then back to herself as she rekindles the romance with Matthew.
How long can she keep up her deception? More or less the 91 minute running time of the film, until all ends well for everyone involved.
Frothy, foolish, with not one moment that's remotely believable, but damn, Breckinridge is such a relatable sweetheart, no matter which identity she's in, who can resist her? Obviously.....not us. 3 stars (***).
She's Making A List (Hallmark Plus 2025)
Now here's a Hallmark Christmas movie that took us a little by surprise, given that we always find these films structured as rigidly as Haiku poems and Kabuki Theater.
Yes, we're aware that a few of the annual Hallmark holiday offerings do in fact stray into the fantasy genre, dragging in Santa, elves, reindeer and even the North Pole.
But "She's Making A List", top-lined by the reigning King and Queen of Hallmark's star stable, Lacy Chabert and Andrew W. Walker, is an expensively mounted and plotted excursion into Make Believe. Assembled with the customary Hallmark gloss, it's loaded up with clever bits and pieces swiped from paranoid corporate thrillers.
The bonkers premise here? Santa has outsourced his naughty and nice lists to a vast private company, who track worldwide children's behaviors via omnipresent satellite surveillance and special agents sent out to spy on individual kids. And tykes caught in naughtiness can look forward to a literal lump of coal under their tree. Yikes.
Creepy, right? Like 'Miracle on 34th St." meets '1984' But leave it to the Hallmark elves to candy coat the proceedings by having an outlier Naughty-Nice agent played by the eternally cute Lacey Chabert, who at 43, can still effectively play the channel's usual late 20's, early 30's heroines.
Chabert, as inspector Isabel, spies on her current target, a potentially naughty little girl who's actually still grief stricken over the loss of her mom. As a typical slow burning Hallmark-ian romance develops between Isabel and the girl's dad (Walker), she tries to convince the company CEO that the naughty-nice decisions should be predicated on each child's individual backgrounds and histories.
But the CEO's a repulsive misogynistic sleaze. While patronizing Isabel, he's planning an algorithm that will automatically judge kids regardless of who or what they actually are.
Take heart, one and all..... it takes a visit to Santa himself, who's headquartered, for some reason, in Delaware, to sort things out properly. (Delaware? Maybe it's cause Santa's a sucker for tax-free shopping.....)
We got a kick out of the corporate center, which boasts even more huge surveillance monitors than you'd find in a Tom Clancy-Jack Ryan movie. It's clear that Hallmark honchos wanted this movie to stand out among their yearly Countdown to Christmas cinematic fruitcakes.
And it does indeed, but that's mostly due to the easy charm and natural likability of Chabert and Walker, who've been pluggin' away at this year after year......
For connoisseurs of the Hallmark Christmas oeuvre, this one's a 3 star (***) keeper.
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