Christmas is a time for abandoning your critical faculties. While some holiday movies are bonafide masterpieces, for the most part they should be judged by a different criteria: it’s not about whether they’re “good” by any reasonable definition, but whether they are pleasant enough to watch while relaxing with friends or family, your mind dulled by hot toddies and festive cheer.

That is the spirit in which I’m judging 2023’s slate of Christmas films, all of which are now available to watch on streaming platforms. I am no cinephile, no film bro, no snooty Pauline Kael; I’m simply a man who wants to chuckle at some extremely mild comedy and well up a few times – mid movies for the bleak midwinter.

Even by those standards, 2023 has been a mixed bag. There’s been a notable dearth of romantic comedies: if you’re into frazzled career women returning to their hometowns, falling in love with a lumberjack and foiling an evil property developer’s plans to turn a beloved Christmas lodge into luxury condos, you might be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you like fantasy movies about terrible fathers learning to chill out or become less selfish, you’re in for a bonanza. Here are the best, the worst and the most aggressively OK festive films of 2023.

BEST CHRISTMAS. EVER! (NETFLIX)

Forgive me for being cruel, but a more apt title for this might have been Worst. Christmas. Movie. Ever! This film is about two old college friends, played by Brandy and Heather Graham. Every year, Brandy writes a smug Round Robin letter about her perfect life: she lives in a mansion, her ten-year-old daughter is the youngest person ever to get accepted into Harvard, her husband is hot and runs a karate dojo, and her son is off doing important humanitarian work in Africa (or is he…?) Heather Graham, meanwhile, is a failed inventor who is married to a humble property developer (played by Jason Briggs of American Pie fame). She thinks that Brandy is lying about her perfect life and, due to an extremely implausible plot contrivance, ends up bringing her family to Brandy’s mansion the week before Christmas – where hilarity very much does not ensue.

The film isn’t funny, heartwarming, tear-jerking, or anything else you might want from a Christmas movie: it is nothing. It’s about as bad as a film can possibly be without reaching the level of “so bad it’s good”. The film is centred around Brandy and Heather Graham’s friendship, but they have zero chemistry and very little to say to one another – their moments of intimacy include excruciatingly banal dialogue like “everyone makes mistakes: that’s why they put an eraser at the end of a pencil”. By the end I was utterly unmoved, my eyes paper-dry and my heart as cold as ice: not once did I feel the ineffable spark of Christmassiness. ‘Best Christmas ever‘ my arse – I pray God it’s our last!

RATING: 🎄

DASHING THROUGH THE SNOW (DISNEY +)

Now we’re cooking with cinnamon! In comparison to Best. Christmas. Ever!, this was a masterpiece. Ludacris plays a social worker in Atlanta, who hates Christmas because his dad beat up a robber dressed as Santa one time, and then his parents got divorced, or something. On the night of Christmas Eve, he and his daughter end up getting into an adventure with a man who claims to be Santa (played by comedian Lil Rel Howery), who is on the run from an evil politician. I thought Howery was genuinely funny in the Santa role, and on more than one occasion I found myself chuckling at his whimsical diatribes about life in the North Pole (his doctor is a penguin!) 

Ludacris is also very likeable in the role of a beleaguered father. In fact, if I had one criticism of the film, it’s that he’s almost too perfect at the beginning. He’s no Ebenezer Scrooge in need of redemption; he is good at his job, has a strong relationship with his daughter, and even seems to be on the verge of getting back together with his ex-wife, with whom he is amiably separated. All of which makes the narrative seem slightly pointless: he doesn’t really need to go on a magical journey of self-discovery with Santa Claus. He’s just a nice guy who happens to dislike Christmas, which is valid! But while it flagged at the end a bit, I felt quite heart-warmed by the end.

RATING: 🎄🎄🎄🎄

IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE (SHUDDER) 

Over the last few years, there has been a trend of slashers which reimagine classic films: Happy Death Day took inspiration from Groundhog Day, Freaky was a twist on Freaky Friday, and this year’s Totally Killer was a self-conscious homage to Back to the Future. All of these premises worked surprisingly well as horror films, but with It’s a Wonderful Knife, the trend may have finally reached its limit.

As you might have guessed from the title, it takes the story of beloved Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and throws a serial killer into the mix. It doesn’t really work. Winnie (Jane Widdup) is a teenage girl who stops a masked murderer in the middle of a killing spree, and reveals his identity as a self-important local businessman (Justin Long). The following Christmas Eve, she is alienated from her family, grieving her friends who died, and discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating on her, so she wishes she had never been born. Thanks to a magical Aurora Borealis which grants her this wish, she finds herself in a terrible new reality where the killer has continued his rampage throughout the year.

The biggest problem with this film is that it is a horror-comedy that is neither scary nor funny. The killer’s costume (a flowery white robe with a plastic mask and leather gloves) is so ridiculous that it robs him of any menace; as does the fact that we already know that he’s just a dorky, middle-aged man – it’s like watching an episode of Scooby Doo in reverse. On the plus side, Jane Widdup is likeable in the lead role and her friendship-turned-romance with a bullied, autistic-coded girl with whom she teams up is quite touching. It wasn’t a “good film” by any means – but in the spirit of the season, I’ve decided to be generous and award it three Christmas trees, although I’m not quite sure it deserves it.

RATING: 🎄🎄🎄

CANDY CANE LANE (AMAZON PRIME) 

Candy Cane Lane is about a competition for the best Christmas decorations in a suburban neighbourhood, which, for some reason, has a cash prize of $100k. Because he has just been made redundant, Eddie Murphy is so desperate to win this that he falls into the hands of an evil elf (played by Jillian Bell), who sells him a cursed Christmas tree which brings to life ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’: turtle doves, swans, a partridge in a pear tree etc. It’s a far more bird-based song than I had remembered.

I thought this film was perfectly fine, but it could have been a little nastier or more anarchic in its execution – watching the family get gang-stalked by different breeds of birds started to feel a little underwhelming. Obviously, there’s a limit to how edgy an Eddie Murphy Christmas film called Candy Cane Lane is going to be, but a film like Gremlins provides a good template for festive comedy-horror. Give us something with a little bit of bite; give us an elderly woman in a mobility scooter being chased off a cliff by a flock of French hens, or something.

RATING: 🎄🎄🎄

GENIE (NOW TV)

Written by Love Actually director Richard Curtis, this film has been getting absolutely slated by the critics (the Metacritic score currently stands at a shameful 35 per cent). I don’t find this response baffling, but nor do I think it was all that terrible. Paapa Essiedu (who starred in I May Destroy You) plays a beleaguered father: when he misses his daughter’s birthday because he’s so busy at work, his wife packs her bags. Essiedu is offered a chance at winning back his family when he rubs an old jewellery box and out comes Melissa McCarthy, a genie who is capable of granting him wishes, rather than the traditional three. This premise is mostly used as a springboard for unfettered consumption and shopping sprees in expensive department stores, which I found a little gauche, even if the protagonist does eventually discern ‘the real meaning of Christmas’.

Personally, I have a lot of time for Melissa McCarthy, and I thought she was entertaining in this, doing her little schtick. Paapa Essiedu was also very affable in the lead role and the two of them shared a nice chemistry – but the material wasn’t particularly funny. It’s also just kind of a weird premise (the genie, as a figure associated with Islamic folklore, doesn’t exactly scream Christmas) and the “fish out of water” comedy doesn’t work: McCarthy is the spirit of an ancient peasant who doesn’t know what “New York” or “sanitiser” is, but she speaks in an American accent and with the cadence of someone who’s spent several hundred hours watching Parks and Rec. 

The big tear-jerking moment at the end was effective enough – if, like me, you well up at adverts – but it felt a little unearned. I don't think this was worse than It’s a Wonderful Knife or Candy Cane Lane, really, but due to Richard Curtis’s bonafides as a Christmas filmmaker I’m going to judge it more harshly.

RATING: 🎄🎄

FAMILY SWITCH (NETFLIX)

“Netflix viewers disgusted by ‘incest’ scene” is not a headline you want to be getting for your new family-friendly Christmas comedy, yet this is the fate that befell the makers of Family Switch. Having watched the scene in question, (the mum and dad, who are really the teenage siblings, are bullied into having a quick kiss at a party) this controversy seems a little overcooked, but I still didn’t think the film was very good.

It’s a classic body-swap film which pokes fun at how derivative its premise is (at one point, Jennifer Garner exclaims, “This is a completely unique and original situation that has literally never happened before” and the other characters respond, “You’re telling me? I’m 17 again!”, “It’s freaky!’ etc.) In Family Switch, the mother and daughter trade places, as do the father and son, the baby and the dog. I always enjoy the part in a body swap film where – right before the inciting magical or scientific event, in this case a freak planetary alignment – the characters are like, “You just don’t understand what it’s like to be me!” “Oh yeah? Well you would never last a day in my shoes!!!”, and Family Switch hams this up to entertaining effect. As with all body-swap films, they all have something extremely important to do the following day (a Yale interview, a make-or-break soccer match, and things of that nature) and decide to go ahead with them instead of taking the more reasonable action of pretending to have food poisoning until the situation is resolved.

This leads to some mildly amusing antics throughout, but quite a lot of the humour didn’t land for me, such as when an important business meeting gets derailed by a bout of excess farting – such crude, puerile and uncouth vulgarity is contrary to the spirit of Christmas! In fact, my biggest critique of this film (aside from it not being very funny) is that it’s not very Christmassy – that part of the plot feels tacked on, and Los Angeles is way too sun-drenched to offer the cosy, wintry atmosphere I crave. If they’d changed the setting to New York and thrown a bit of snow in the mix, I might have been more forgiving, but as it stands.

RATING: 🎄🎄

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