This Time Each Year | 2024 Christmas Movies

What do you do when you are Hallmark and you want to have a movie about a very serious subject but you can’t really say the name of the serious subject? Call it This Time Each Year and throw it on the Hallmark Mystery channel. It’s a mystery if you don’t actually say the word, right?

Lauren (Alison Sweeney) and Kevin (Niall Matter) are having marriage troubles. They have been separated for a year but Lauren still hasn’t told her mother. When her mother comes to visit, Lauren asks Kevin to pretend nothing has happened. Will this bring them together or break them farther apart?

This is a movie about alcoholism that doesn’t want to actually be about alcoholism. Kevin was successfully working as a bartender and not drinking when his boss randomly fires him because he doesn’t want to tempt Kevin with holiday parties? Kevin walks everywhere (even though we don’t see that) because he lost his license the year prior, though they don’t ever say how or why he lost his license. (If it was drunk driving, you rarely lose your license in the US after only one instance.) This Time doesn’t want to make Kevin out to be a bad guy. He has to get back with Lauren, after all. But it really is disingenuous to only give him vague alcoholic stereotypes that don’t seem to have any actual consequence.

If you overlook this giant shadow hanging over the movie, it’s still pretty boring. Lauren spends the entire movie feeling bad for herself. One of the big problems they have is a house the couple bought before they split. It’s a gorgeous house that they claim is a money pit but, again, they only give vague things that needed to be fixed in the house. When we actually see various parts of the house, there isn’t anything that seems wrong. I know that you can’t always see the bad parts of a house but they literally named things like “the staircase” and “the roof” but neither needed work. Anyway, Lauren blames herself for buying the house and putting their family in financial strain and it is just so lame. Neither of these people are interesting and the movie neuters the parts it wants to make interesting.

Rating: Just sell the house already

Holiday Crashers | 2024 Christmas Movies

Once again, I did zero research on Holiday Crashers before I turned it on. I suddenly heard a familiar voice…and that is when I realized that Daniella Monet, who has starred in number of shows and movies on Nickelodeon, is the secondary female lead. I definitely did not expect her to show up in a Hallmark Christmas movie. This better be good!

Toni (Lyndsy Fonseca) and Bri (Monet) are best friends that happen to work together in a card shop. When Bri finds an extra invitation to a client’s fancy Christmas party, she suggests that the duo spend the season crashing the holiday parties of the shop’s customers. They make up fake personas and have an amazing time. Until Toni, who finished law school but never finished the bar exam, gets mistaken for a working lawyer. Afraid to come clean, she drags Bri with her on a corporate retreat to Vermont to help a business with an acquisition. Will it all come apart when the truth comes out?

I have to admit that Holiday Crashers was pretty fun. I loved the parts where Toni and Bri were making up backstories for themselves, no matter how ridiculous they were. Of course, later in the movie they backfire but that is what makes it fun, right? I don’t think this movie would have worked as well if they didn’t have Monet playing Bri. Monet has an ability to give amazing personalities to characters that you probably shouldn’t like. If anyone else had this role, I can almost guarantee that Bri would have been grating and annoying instead of playful.

Another plus in the movie is that we don’t get one romance, we get two. And we actually get a little more story between Bri and Vinny (Jag Bal) than we do with the “main” romance, Toni and Justin (Chris McNally). I’m OK with that since I like Bri as a character better than Toni anyway. But for those of you looking for the romance part of these movies, this one won’t let you down.

Rating: Can I get a sequel with Bri and Vinny next year?

A Season For Family | 2023 Christmas Movies

Thanks to the commercials, I knew that A Season For Family was about adoption. But I didn’t know who was the adopted one and what that meant to the plot of the movie. In short, Hallmark commercials kinda suck.

Maddy (Stacey Farber) and her adopted son, Wesley (Benjamin Jacobson), come back to their hometown in Utah. While shopping for ski rentals, they meet Paul (Brendan Penny) and his adopted son, Cody (Azriel Dalman). Little did Maddy and Paul know that Wesley and Cody are actually brothers.

For once, the kids take center stage in a Hallmark movie. Sure, there is a little bit of romance between Maddy and Paul but that is secondary to the needs of Wesley and Cody. Granted, I think Paul makes way too big of a deal regarding telling Cody that he’s adopted and that Wesley is his brother. Especially since the boys get along so well. But I guess they had to pad the script somehow. In the end, this is a sweet movie for someone looking for more than just straight up romance.

Rating: No fighting from these brothers

Lights, Camera, Christmas! | 2022 Christmas Movies

Most of the time, I don’t watch these Christmas movies with my husband. He’s not particularly fond of them. (Gee, I wonder why.) He happened to catch a bit of Lights, Camera, Christmas! and he raised an eyebrow at a Christmas movie about making a Christmas movie. Yep, that’s Hallmark for you!

Kerry (Kimberley Sustad) is a fashion designer with her own shop. A Christmas movie starring Brad (John Brotherton) and Mariah (Veronica Long) comes to film in her hometown. When they lose their costume designer, Kerry gets hired to step in. During the shoot, Kerry rediscovers her love of fashion and Brad learns how to get out of his comfort zone.

There isn’t a lot to say about Lights, Camera, Christmas! There is this corny joke about Brad winking at the camera at the end of every one of his romcom movies. Then, at the end of this corny romcom movie, Kerry winks at the camera. That is the overall vibe of the movie. Kerry not only seems uncomfortable in her own skin most of the time, she doesn’t seem to know how to say no to people. I guess this is somehow attractive to Brad. Or maybe it’s that she has no idea who he is, even though he’s supposed to be a giant movie star. I honestly don’t understand a lot of the motivations in this movie.

Of course, I should note that this entire movie is played as a flashback. Everyone is on a panel of a Q&A at the movie premiere and all of the scenes are answers to questions the audience asked. I think it takes away from the plot a bit. There are a few scenes where things go wrong but we know they finish the movie because they are at the premiere. It would have played a little bit better if we didn’t have the Q&A and just had the making of the movie.

Should you watch it? Lights, Camera, Christmas! is a fine movie to watch. I wish they took the Christmas movie parody to the next level but I guess you can’t have everything. At least we get decent acting and an OK plot. Maybe you’ll enjoy a bit more after a glass or two of wine.

Five Star Christmas | 2020 Christmas Movies

Can a movie be a comedy of errors if it isn’t funny?

When Lucy (Bethany Joy Lenz) returns home for Christmas, she finds that her father has turned her childhood house into a bed & breakfast. Once the news is broken to the rest of the family, they find out that the inn isn’t doing very well. The gang decides that they need to attract travel blogger Bea Turner to their B&B in order to get a five star review and gain more customers.

I don’t want to give away the twist, in case anyone wants to watch this…but it will make it difficult to talk about. After all, the plot of the movie revolves around mistaken identities and characters lying about who they really are. Lucy makes her family lie about who they are, while making assumptions about the actual customers staying with them. It’s a bit of a mess.

To be honest, the best part of the whole movie is that Lucy’s younger sister, Amber (Grace Beedie), gets to use her alternate persona to discover what she would like to do with her life. Lucy’s older brother, Will (Blair Penner), and his wife, Suzanne (Barbara Patrick), have a major life change that is pretty much overlooked. I think they put in way too many characters. None of them get quite enough screen time to make them real.

Can I recommend Five Star Christmas? I don’t think so. The movie wants to be an ensemble piece but it just isn’t there. Hallmark should stick to focusing on the romantic couple rather than everyone around them.