Woah, Hallmark Mystery has actually given us a mystery movie! Sadly, Five Gold Rings isn’t the type of movie that we, the viewers, can solve along with the characters. But it is a mystery!

As a child, Audrey (Holland Roden) would watch her grandmother return lost items to people during the Christmas season. After her grandmother passed, Audrey was tasked with finding the owners of five gold rings to return the valuable items. Her grandmother insisted that Audrey get help from Finn O’Sullivan (Nolan Gerard Funk), the first person that had a lost item returned. The pair fall in love as they find the owners of the rings.

Five Gold Rings started off as a decent movie. I thought we would get some really good sleuthing. Instead, we keep getting sidetracked with Audrey's failing art career and a grumpy rival shop owner and making Finn’s mother feel better about her art. There was so much going on that wasn’t trying to find the owners of the rings. Obviously, they find all of the owners but it all seemed a lot easier than it should have been. I get why writers think we need useless side plots to keep us entertained but sometimes we don’t really need that. We just need a good story.

Rating: The fifth ring was the lamest story of all.

As I predicted last year, we got Time For Him To Come Home For Christmas from the Blake Shelton series of movies. This is the fifth movie in the series, based on one of his songs, and the third that I have watched. I wonder where they will go after they do Time For Her.

Three days before Christmas, Elizabeth (Holland Roden) gets a mysterious voice message intended for someone named Madeline. As a former investigative journalist, she tries to track down Madeline in order to reunite her with the caller. Her estranged best friend, Josh (Tyler Hynes), helps her figure out the mystery.

Of the three Time To Come Home movies I have watched so far, this was the best. The mystery was definitely better than the previous ones and I think Hynes and Roden were a perfect duo. They easily pulled off the difficult relationship that Lizzie and Josh have. And we got just enough flash backs to understand their history and all of the misunderstandings that came between them. For once, this was an understandable conflict. Yes, it could have been solved with a conversation but, given the situation, it would have been an extremely difficult conversation to have at the time.

I also liked that Lizzie and Josh weren’t the only romance in the movie. The relationship between Madeline (Meghan Gardiner) and her mysterious caller (Steve Bacic) was not only fraught itself but it also intertwined with Lizzie and Josh in a way that I wasn’t expecting. These layers upon layers of characterization is what I want in a movie. I know not every Christmas movie can have that but I would love to see more that do.

So, yes, go watch Time For Him To Come Home For Christmas. Hey, it even ends with a singer. You know, the trendy job to have this Christmas season.