A batch of proper cheesy Christmas movies appeared on iPlayer and with a spare ninety minutes, I figured it couldn’t hurt to watch one of these babies for free. This one was actually pretty respectable for a Hallmark movie, although not a patch on some of the better festive rom-coms we’ve watched. Some of the story choices didn’t really make sense, and the sentimental nature of it sometimes veered into irritating, but the male lead was great and I think they had the beginnings of some good chemistry.

I loved this. A short collection of essays by the author about the joys and horrors of Christmas, and particularly about those horrors that are really joys and you would miss if they weren’t there. They’re written so well to really bring you into the moment. I can completely imagine the swimming pool situation - Santa in a swimming pool is such a weird concept. And the endless obsessions over the moistness of a turkey. Brilliant. Just a great read and so easy to get through in one sitting.

This is such a weird movie. It feels like it’s trying to be a comedic take on the cheesy Hallmark movies, but it doesn’t quite do enough with that to make you sure that’s the aim. What it does do, though, is lead you on as though it is a cheesy movie and then suddenly someone says something completely startling and unexpected that just can’t help be funny. I liked it, it was really entertaining. I don’t know that I could recommend it and it’s certainly not going to be one that is watchable over and over for Christmas forever. But it was a great experience.

This was a nice, cosy Christmas read, As per the traditional rom-com Christmas story, the girl who fled to the city has come home to face up to her family and her past.. and find love along the way. I liked this because although some elements of it were really predictable, it didn’t all happen in the way I was expecting. The pair were happy by mid-way through the book so then something was bound to come and split them up for a bit but what was it… and then the whole parentage thing. A good read.

This is a perfectly fine retelling of A Christmas Carol, great voice cast, good enough songs, nice animation. But it doesn’t really add anything to the Dickens universe, there’s not a lot new or exciting about it. I feel like at this point, the story has been done so often that you need to add something to it or have a unique take on it to make it worthwhile. This is fine, but there are other better ones to watch. (Muppets!)

On the surface this is better than the previous film. The graphics were better, naturally, and it has a coherent story that is at least one thing rather than two very different things trying to work together. It lacks from Bernard’s absence, and it really is weird that the in-laws were happy to believe elves were Canadians just because they kept saying ’eh’ a lot.

The underlying story of this is fine - a bit of a rom-com, a bit of our heroine saving the local theatre from closure, a bit of Christmas fun and games. But I don’t know that the characters held up their end of the bargain. The sister, Cleo, was hideous to her sister and took any opportunity to criticise, whilst our main character Sam(antha) was an odd creature, pretty judgmental herself and very buttoned-up. I did like the relationship with her and Jimmy though, it progressed nicely. This was a freebie, I think, so nothing wasted, but not a favourite.

Okay, what is this film? It’s like two very different movies shoe-horned together, one is good, one is not good, and where they crossover, it’s worse. The rom-com, family drama with a heartwarming Christmas gifts scene and a kid trying to find his place in a difficult teenage world, is actually really good - entertaining and funny and worth watching.

I really liked this book, it kicks off with a chance glance through a bus window and then whizzes forward in time to when things start to get very complicated. It’s proper drama from start to finish, stepping forward in time each year to revisit the characters and where they’re at in their lives. It was well written and engaging, I wanted to know what was going to happen next and loved it. But I guess it wasn’t too Christmassy, only really that first bit. Not a real complaint though.

I whipped through this book in super quick time, my first Christmas book of the festive season. It starts off with our heroine running out on her wedding and very quickly falling into the arms of her saviour, who of course comes with his own baggage. At first, I thought this was going to be a bit dull, the pair fell in love very quickly and usually what we’re looking for in Christmas cheesy rom-coms is the will-they-won’t-they. But it started taking twists and turns I wasn’t expecting and kept me reading until the end. Not bad, but I suppose not really that Christmassy once the initial stage is over.

This is a brilliant Christmas film. Fully British and cute and funny, odd-ball people doing odd-ball things and learning and growing and getting all festive at the same time. It wasn’t until afterwards that we put two and two together in terms of Jim O’Hanlon being of Trying fame too - how much we love Trying makes perfect sense with how much we loved this film.

Ooh this was a bad one. It was entertaining enough to get to the end but there wasn’t really a lot redeeming about it. There was no chemistry between the two leads and the plot was entirely implausible - from the music industry side to the home-town that seemingly has its own micro-climate. Also, it seems like no one knew Freddie Prinze Jr had Latino heritage so that’s a surprise to us all. I don’t recommend watching this but, have to admit, the PA woman was wonderful.

As a vehicle for Bill Murray’s best darkly comic grumpiness, this is perfect. As a movie that’s supposed to be a take on A Christmas Carol, it’s really not great. Firstly it makes no sense why the woman would have fallen for Bill, stayed with him, and actively wanted to get back together with him before even his redemption journey started. I call it a redemption journey but he really doesn’t seem to be learning any lessons, remaining pretty miserable and dour the whole way through until suddenly BANG he’s all better with a big speech on TV.

There’s nothing new about this movie at all - it is that same old Christmas story told over and over. High powered city girl ends up in the cosy Christmas village and falls in love, fixes everything, etc, etc. It had so many elements of other films with the most obvious comparison to Overboard, but it held its own and wasn’t entirely predictable. It’s probably the best new Christmas film we’ve had for a while (sorry Hudgens).

This is the one that we were aiming for, the reason we rushed through the previous two entries in the franchise. It was good! I would say not as good as the first one, but a lot better than the second. It’s a different thing, because they’re not travelling, the family are stuck at home and everything that goes wrong has to happen there. That gave it Home Alone vibes, particularly when he was bumbling around the loft hurting himself.

Traditionally, I don’t let Christmas start until 1st December but this released on Apple TV+ on Friday and it just had to be watched, so this year, Christmas comes early! It was so good, a lot better than I was expecting. I thought it would just be Ryan and Will reliving the story of A Christmas Carol and putting their silly brand of humour in it. But it was a musical with really good songs, it was a twist on the traditional tale, and it was full of heart and humour and a surprising ending. This is definitely one that will be rewatched many years in the future.

So then, what is it? It’s a black comedy, for sure, and a lot of the humour lies in being at a tricky family gathering without the trouble of consequences, so there’s a big battle between British politeness and not giving a hoot about tomorrow. There are some great performances in there, particularly Keira who does frantic trying-to-keep-it-all-together host really well, and Matthew who gradually lets his frustrations show as the night wears on.

This is a reasonable Christmas movie, and a warring neighbours one - kind of the fictional version of the Fight Before Christmas. DeVito and Broderick make a good sparring duo, and it’s nice that they both have relatively good reasons for doing what they do. But ultimately, it is just two men having a competition for no good reason and the women being slightly more sensible and sorting it all out. Plus there are a couple of moments in the movie that haven’t aged so well, and it’s not even twenty years old yet! But mostly worth a festive watch.

Yea, this is two very poor Christmas movies in a row. The thing about this one is, it could be good. There are elements in there that are mildly entertaining but it has so many problems, it just doesn’t work. The most fundamental issue is this feels like at least three different films smooshed together. There’s the woodcutter learning how to be santa (that got off to a slow start, I will admit), there’s the dissatisfied elf heading down to earth (Dudley Moore is great in this, except for those GOD DAMN PUNS), and then the homeless kid learning the true meaning of Christmas.

Combine our run of Christmas films with our aim to work through Tom Hanks’ back catalogue and you get this, The Polar Express. It’s not really been a burning ambition of mine to watch, this kind of mo-cap sets my teeth on edge a bit, but worth a go, anyway. It was what I thought and somewhat worse. I’ve read that the animation style was to get around restrictions on the rights of the book (the author didn’t want this to be animation even though it would be seven thousand times better if it was), so I can see they were being pioneering in their own way, but it’s not great and it’s only getting more dated.

It’s hard to describe this film. If you’re sick of the Christmas cheer and chirpiness then it’s the perfect antidote. I never mind someone being super grumpy about Christmas and/or being surrounded by kids but this does push the limit on occasion! Billy Bob is great though, at being a terrible human with just an inch of good left in him. The moments where you can see the boy finding chinks in the armour are great.

Last year, I wrote about the top five Christmas television specials, featuring such gems as the wonderful Vicar of Dibley, the ever-engaging Doctor Who and of course, my complete obsession with The Goes Wrong Show. Looking back at this now, I’m a bit annoyed that I called it the top five because… I don’t know how much thought I put into it actually being the BEST five. They were certainly five very good specials that were on my mind at the time, but the best? That’s a much bigger question. Like Ross, I would need to give that some thought, come up with a shortlist, make my final decisions, and laminate the results so they can’t be changed.

Aw, this was a nice film. I wasn’t completely sure what to expect really, the title makes it sound like it’s going to be a bit Wreck-It Ralph and deep diving into tech nostalgia. There’s an element of that, but it’s more of a traditional ‘what I learned at Christmas’ story, with Neil Patrick Harris very capably and engagingly narrating the story.

This is such a good documentary, a really insightful look at both sides of a neighbourhood war, with one side coming out a bit snippy but mostly fine, and the other looking like an absolute madman obsessed with Christmas and also suing people - two things you wouldn’t think go hand in hand. The film is really neatly put together, gradually peeling away layers to reveal more and more the obsession and hatred that developed.

If we rewind six months of so, and ask my former self if the upcoming Hawkeye TV show would have been my most anticipated of the new MCU TV outings, I would have laughed long and hard. But then they signed up Hailee Steinfeld, then they set it at Christmas, and then they made all the artwork and superhero uniforms purple. Tick, tick, tick. The season finale was released yesterday, bringing to a close a six-episode arc that introduced a new character to Hawkeye’s life, as well as bringing in some returning faces both friend and foe. And you know what? I loved it. Every episode was well crafted, the banter between first Clint and Kate, and then Kate and Yelena, was top notch, it had a good mystery at the heart, solved a lot but also left plenty of questions open, and it was a heartwarming journey into living with grief as well.

I read this because we watched the film, and it was exactly what I expected - a really good children’s book with some excellent illustrations. It reminded me very much of Roald Dahl in the best possible ways. The film stuck very closely to the book to start with, just a few tweaks here and there, but the ending was quite different. In the book, Nikolas well and truly becomes Father Christmas with the big beard and belly and laugh and older. In the film, he’s still a kid when he has his big idea. The book makes more sense on that front, but I say it’s worth enjoying both!

This is the second book in a row I’ve read where the central idea is great, and the characters are interesting, but there just seems to be a big lull in the middle. Once the big crime occurred, it was really just a book of following these characters around as they walked through a nature reserve in the dark, either acting suspiciously or thinking about their suspicions. In the end, the mystery reveal and the twist were good, it just felt like it took ages to get there.

Right. Where to start? The good: Michael Sheen is obviously amazing. The aesthetic of each carriage was incredible. The time travelling story pretty well stacked up, and I liked it. I wanted to know what would happen in each successive carriage.

I’ll be honest, I was enjoying the movie okay, it seemed like a sweet story within a story and it was going places. But then Stephen Merchant piped up as a talking mouse and it really hit a new level of fun. It gathered speed, and actually became really moving and quite insightful. Maggie Smith is also brilliant, and quite under-used really, only popping up every now and then to ground the story in a certain amount of reality. But it’s all lovely and very Christmassy and now I want to zip through the book as well. Good times.

Four years ago (!) I published a Christmas playlist, having taken offence at some of the collections various streaming services had pulled together. Their festive mixes included party songs that really had no business being on a Christmas-related playlist, other than being good for the office get-together. They got you in an uplifted spirit but were they really true to the name? No. Since then, it seems like Christmas has been a growing trend for everyone, more films, more TV, and definitely more songs, as I’ve had to put together a second volume of the playlist, cleverly titled: How a Christmas playlist should be done Vol. 2.

This was a good set up for a story, people heading out of their comfort zone for a final Christmas together as a family, and I really felt the atmosphere nicely. I didn’t feel like there was a lot of plot to unravel, though - from the very beginning it was clear that the parents didn’t actually want to split, we knew straight away that there had been a miscommunication over the sexuality of our main couple, and all the other ones needed was a minute to relax. It was mostly just like spending time in the company of these characters, rather than actually getting a super-duper story. But still, very Christmassy!

I really loved this book, very well written, in depth and with some lovely characters that developed as the book wound its way towards Christmas. At first I thought we were never going to get there, we started so far out from the big day and there was so much evolving, but we made it, and everyone got a happy ending of sorts. I just want to know what happens next… how on earth is Merry going to manage all those orders in the new year!

I’m not a huge stoner movie fan, it’s just not something I have reference to, and you know that’s exactly what you’re getting when Seth Rogan teams up with some buddies for one final night out. It was better than I thought it was going to be, although still a bit of a hot mess. The supernatural angle was only slightly there which made it more irritating than insightful, and I really feel like he could have said that Miley 90% forced him to propose which might have calmed her down a bit.

I really loved this film, it was so good in that it totally embraced the cliches but then didn’t always stick to them. I thought it was going to be another one of those ’let’s go home and pretend we’re a couple’ movies, but it didn’t do that. It threw in a blind date curveball. I loved the quirky family, although they interfere way too much, and I love that there was an underlying friendship, always, and it was just about taking that risk. Lovely. Plus, there was a dance routine to Britney. SOLD.

Mildy better than the third installment of The Princess Switch, but probably not a great film. It was entertaining and cosy, the argument at the end felt a bit over-the-top and really just there to give the conflict that needs to be resolved for a happy ending. The characters were cute though and the village adorable, and I liked that he wasn’t your traditional heroic lead. A medium level entry in the Netflix Christmas Universe.

This… is a weird film. It’s not particularly well made, and it does that thing where it thinks it’s a cartoon - someone pops their head up and a weird sound effect happens, or creeping through a door to creeping sound effects. Annoying. Despite the quite impressive cast, the chemistry and acting isn’t great.

This was a freebie book of the week on Apple Books but as it was a Christmas story, I figured now’s the time to read it! It was actually quite good, a lovely cheesy romance story with characters dealing with their baggage and working their way through misunderstandings. My only complaint is there were a few spelling and grammar mistakes - the kind that a spellcheck wouldn’t pick up but were still quite jarring. Looking aside from that, though, it was a cosy Christmas book with a happy ending.

Yea, this just wasn’t very good at all. No one’s going to say that the previous two were works of art, but they were Christmassy and fun and why not. This was the weakest of the lot by a long way. The fact that it was Christmas was tangential to the entire story, and two of the three Vanessa Hudgens characters took a back seat… presumably because they are both happily married and that’s the end of their story. They are no longer interesting people. Rage.

I wanted to watch this the moment it came out but had to wait for it to be Christmas o’clock. It was worth the wait, a really good, mushy, rom-com for Christmas. The title’s a bit weird, and some of the character decisions don’t make perfect sense, but if you go with it, it’s a lot of fun and comes to a really heart-warming ending.

The biggest challenge with these movies is making the situation plausible - getting left behind is a pretty big deal so it needs to be believable. This one did a pretty good job, split flights, one parent thinking the child is with the other. I also liked that they weren’t just a big bad pair of burglars, there was another side to the story too.

Managed to squeeze in this Christmas book before the festive season came to a close, and I’m so glad I did, it was lovely. I thought the premise sounded a bit bizarre - random strangers collecting at a beach hut over Christmas? How does that work? But actually, in context it made perfect sense and was such a warm read. This disparate group of people escaping from their real lives and coming together to help each other out. It all came to a happy but not totally sappy ending.

Not everyone loves Christmas, obviously, and even more so when the festive season is taken out of context and moved to a different season than you’re used to. Peter Kay’s YouTube channel popped this video of Car Share clips up recently, highlighting when Kayleigh brought her Christmas CD into the car during the height of summer. John wasn’t impressed, to say the least! My favourite quotes:

This is a work of art - a brand new Christmas musical has just popped up out of nowhere! It’s not perfect, the town is ridiculous, Dolly is as camp as ever, and I have a few questions about the story but if you put all that aside, it’s lovely.

In a festive season where everyone’s plans have gone awry, we instead focus on the Christmas content we know and love. There are so many TV Christmas specials out there, but only a few that I revisit on a regular basis. Here’s a countdown of five of them… Vicar of Dibley - The Christmas Lunch Incident Just a joy from start to finish - Geraldine trying to do the best for her parishioners at the expense of her own sanity, as usual! The brussel sprout competition, the giant portions, the incredible conversations at Alice’s house. It’s lovely.

Firstly, this really is an incredible cast, and I really liked the individual stories. It’s natural to compare it to Love Actually - all those separate strands winding together towards the end. Unfortunately, the ending wasn’t the best part though, because I didn’t really buy them as a family. How are those two sisters? And the Arkin, Helms, Chalamet trio seem as unrelated as it’s possible to be.

Yea, I didn’t enjoy this. I was quite looking forward to a Christmas movie that wasn’t all festive and joy and light. Die Hard, anyone? But I didn’t know what was going on, the tone of it was all over the place, and I felt like it was going to take a long time to get going so… other Christmas movies to watch, thanks. Mel Gibson looked like he was doing a good job, though.

This movie is an assault on the senses from the get-go. It has an incredible cast and an interesting premise, but it has that problem that we occasionally find with movies - we were totally on board with them as they were before. So you just know it’s all going to go downhill as they discover the joy of Christmas and babies and weddings and stuff. Boooooo. It’s fun, but stressful, and loud, and chaos and… well quite a lot like Christmas, actually!

Yay for Christmas novels! Another area where you can wrap up warm, settle down with a hot chocolate and revel in the festive spirit. This was a good story although it was really obvious where it was going from the start. I felt like the characters were quite remote, despite a lot of soul-searching, I didn’t necessarily find myself connecting with any of them. Except maybe Brodie, and he wasn’t the central focus. A nice, festive read but not one of my favourites.

It’s another film with an odd premise - someone (?) is going to shut down the fairy godmother school so to stop that happening the only young eager godmother left heads down to earth to save the day. It takes ages to get going, you have to really like Jillian Bell to stick with it.

This is a brilliant film. It’s got an incredible cast to start with, and they are all believable as family or friends or adversaries, or potential partners. Great chemistry and even when they’re not being particularly nice to each other, you understand their reasons and what they’re going through. Relatable even when they’re being awful.