Silent Night (2021)

What a dreary exercise this is, about an annoying group of family and friends, like all those twerps from Four Weddings And A Funeral, gathered for Christmas Eve, and as if that alone were not a situation ripe for high tension and aired grievances and awkward revelations, it also happens to be the eve of the end of the world, so all these goofuses face a decision that is sufficiently ghoulish to keep you watching through the drudgery to the end: they can die painfully from a poisoned atmosphere, or take a pill and die peacefully before the agony starts, Merry Christmas.

★★☆☆☆

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Last Christmas (2019)

Kate, a Bridget Jones type - read, 'annoying' - portrayed by Emilia Clarke, makes a mess of everything - love, work, and relationships including the relationship she has with her boss (Michelle Yeoh in her now perpetual role as a cantankerous Asian Tiger mom), so it makes sense Kate falls for Henry Golding's character - he's a messily conceived part-Willy Wonka pixie-saviour, part-Mr Darcy romantic stalwart slogging-around-on-a-bicycle - who inspires Kate to fix up her messes before the movie reaches an unlikely Christmas magic fantasy ending - a bit like if Bridget Jones suddenly visited Santa's North Pole workshop - but it's an ending that somehow, through all the mess, manages to be touching.

★★☆☆☆

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Klaus (2019)

It hijacks the Christmas tradition and completely fabricates a Christmas origin story, but Klaus is worth watching for the beautiful hand-drawn animation alone, and for Jason Schwartzman's hilarious voice performance of the main character Jesper - a lazy son cast out by his father to a remote snowy outpost - who finds reward in hard work and in getting good out of people, albeit duplicitously.

★★★★☆

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Black Christmas (2019)

I like what they've done here in this clever remake of the 1974 horror, taking the original movie with its classic story of women beseiged from inside, not outside, a safehaven (a sorority house) and injecting into the story a metoo generation commentary, a context that was discernable in the original movie but not wholly intricated into the plot like it is here; but while I think the remake makes a strong and important and relevant point and makes it well about the privilege boys hold, handed to them in pretty much supernatural fashion from their white male forebears, the glossiness and smarts and the beautiful teens as well as the unrestrained finale that elicits a momentary yee-haw but then doubt and dismay at the derailment of such strong feminist commentary, render the movie a mere glossy teen slasher with good intentions, not a horror classic.

★★★☆☆

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Black Christmas (aka 'Stranger In The House') (1974)

This 1974 movie starring Margot Kidder continues a long tradition of suspense movies about women (usually one, but here a whole sorority houseful) threatened by - but safe inside from - a lunatic, eventually realising the danger comes from inside, not outside, the safehaven (The Spiral Staircase, When A Stranger Calls, for example) and it is an exceptionally effective, intelligent horror thriller: well-acted, with a large number of characters all fleshed-out and strong; rich in detail, and with some good humour which helps make, by comparison, the last twenty minutes especially deranged and terrifying!

★★★★★

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Daddy's Home 2 (2017)

The 2017 Bad Moms sequel also perpetuated its comedy by introducing an older generation and in doing so, took the focus off what audiences liked in number one - the moms - but Daddy's Home manages to retain the feel by making the granddads replicas of the dads - it's the same joke being played out again in a movie that is most funny when Will Ferrell is doing his Chevy Chase National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation impersonation.

★★★☆☆

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A Bad Moms Christmas (2017)

"The relationship between a mother and a daughter is complex," says a character in one of this sequel's few scenes that isn't a not-very-funny penis-centric R'n'B music montage, and the best way to demonstrate this complexity is probably not by introducing into the Bad Moms mix three completely over-the-top mother caricatures - a Bree Van de Kamp controlling one, a co-dependent best friend one, and an unnreliable woman-child one - because not only do these cartoons not seem like real moms, they do not have complex relationships with their daughters and their presence all but eclipses the three perfectly imperfect original bad moms that were so endearing and funny in number one.

★☆☆☆☆

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Holiday Inn (1942)

Cleverly built around the themed song-and-dances performed at an inn on occasions such as Valentine's Day, the Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving, this amiable musical from Irving Berlin has a dancer (Fred Astaire) and a singer (Bing Crosby) competing for the affections of their co-stars, and even if you loathe musicals, this light and frothy one with its debut presentation of Crosby's White Christmas will make you smile.

★★★★☆

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Office Christmas Party (2016)

After a really strong set-up and first half, this comedy about the Zenotech corporation's efforts to throw a Christmas party descends, like the party itself, into chaos, abandoning narrative sense, moving the action away from the titular party, and ending on the idea that financial, medical, emotional and organisational woes are best dealt with with a sex and drug orgy, as if the writers themselves lost interest in the film's second half when one of them gave the signal for the others to join him outside for another toke/smoke/chuff/shot/snort/job.

★★☆☆☆

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Turbulence (1997)

This plane disaster movie throws into its Die Hard-esque Christmas context a gang of ruthless Con Air criminals, a Silence of the Lambs serial killer, a Perfect Storm storm, and laws of physics-defying Flight aerobatics, not to mention a Backdraft cabin fire, a "Here's Johnny" The Shining climax, oh and some turbulence, and despite all this cannot hide the fact it is basically an exceedingly silly mid-air "Someone has to fly this plane!" Flying High.

★★☆☆☆

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The Boxtrolls (2014)

Despite its beautiful and wildly imaginative stop-motion animation which recalls those Rankin-Bass Christmas specials of your childhood (Jack Frost, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, etc), this kids movie about underground-dwelling troll creatures who - what? - wear boxes, invent things, and raise a boy, is dreary with the voice-acting and the story hanging detached from the animation, a shame given those visuals.

★★☆☆☆

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Die Hard (1988)

Ever since Hans Gruber and his 'terrorists' faced off with John McClane in the Nakatomi Plaza, action movies have tried to emulate the 80s action classic Die Hard to the extent a formula developed: add to one hostage situation an everyman hero, a droll baddie who spends a scene pretending to be a hostage, then mix in a smarmy, self-interested double-crossing hostage who gets his comeuppance; among the hostages, have an insider love-interest, while outside there is an out-of-their-depth assistant; and make the authorities, the police and government agencies, powerless; but despite the efforts of many copycats, no action flick has bettered Die Hard's formula - not even its four sequels.

★★★★★

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Home Alone (1990)

Poor Kevin is accidentally left home alone over the Christmas holiday period in this kids classic featuring a very cute Macaulay Culkin as Kevin who revels in his newfound freedom, calmly and expertly booby-trapping his home and unleashing Warner Bros cartoon-style violence upon a pair of bumbling house thieves.

★★★★☆

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Christmas With The Kranks (2004)

Not as madcapped, as funny or as focused as National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and Tim Allen can't match Chevy Chase's ability to accentuate the absurd, but this is a harmless Christmas-themed comedy in which the Kranks decide to skip Christmas, much to the consternation of their neighbours.

★★☆☆☆

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A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas (2011)

Harold and Kumar embark on another adventure, this one Christmas-themed (instead of a White Castle, they are seeking a last-minute Christmas tree) and if you can see past a distasteful sexual assault scene and the franchise's problematic portrayal of women generally, this instalment is pretty funny, at least for those who have acquired the politically-incorrect Harold and Kumar taste.

★★★☆☆

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