Devouring This Year's Holiday Movies: Highlights, Lowlights, and Unexpected Delights.

It is the season to slob out on the sofa and consume a box of festive treats in front of a good movie, a awful feature, or one that’s terrible yet terrific.

As always, a selection of new seasonal stories strives to join part of our seasonal watchlist—perhaps even joining the ranks alongside enduring classics like Home Alone, Elf, Love Actually, and Die Hard (no arguments).

Thus, in a noble effort to sort the crackers from the turkeys, and to get into the Christmas spirit, I binged as many recent holiday releases as possible in a single day.

Early Morning: A Very Jonas Christmas Movie

Kicking off, hopefully, on a high. This is the only 2025 title on a popular review site's list of the top 100 holiday films of all time.

The popular band end up stuck in the UK after wrapping up their global concert series and must make it back for Christmas. Their efforts are hindered by an malevolent Father Christmas, who sings to announce they won’t get home until they “find their familial spark.”

The repartee between the squabbling siblings is entertaining even for the non-fan, while followers will no doubt notice lots of in-jokes as they attempt to get back using any means of transport necessary.

It’s a travelogue of mishaps.

It’s not an all-time classic, but is superb for fans and a positive start to the day.

Christmas tree rating: 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄 for Jonas Brothers fans or 🎄🎄🎄 for their loved ones who will have to sit through it.

8.45am - Tinsel Town

Hollywood star Kiefer Sutherland has been cast as a Hollywood star tricked into a traditional British stage show.

“A panto-what??” asks Sutherland’s “hard-to-work-with” and older star Brad Mack, who has seen better days and whose agent has misled him into thinking he’s starring in high-class London stage.

His Aladdin co-stars tell him he’s playing Buttons. “Absolutely not,” he insists angrily. You can guess their retort. Unless you’re not acquainted with traditional stage call-and-response.

There are some very funny lines, some touching storylines, and the ensemble is brilliant, too.

It’s the sort of feature that would be a bit tacky at another season, but is a great entertainment at Christmas.

Festive score: 🎄🎄🎄🎄

10.19am - Christmas Karma

An actor shows up at the outset of this film, too, insulting someone for the next movie straight. Is this a budding festive ritual?

This time, he’s a musical taxi operator who encounters Mr Sood, the modern take on Mr Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Mr Sood is played by an actor from Kunal Nayyar and Christmas Karma is directed by Bend It Like Beckham’s Gurinder Chadha. The familiar story develops as the miserly Mr Sood is haunted by the ghosts of Christmas yesterday, today, and tomorrow, played by Hugh Bonneville, Billy Porter, and Boy George.

This South Asian reinterpretation is at least unique from all the others, but unfortunately he’s not very compelling and Nayyar’s performance is lifeless—a major flaw when he’s so the focal point.

Holiday verdict: 🎄🎄

Lunchtime: Stuffed

There’s time for a major broadcaster's Christmas comedy-drama—which stars Guz Khan as a endearingly grumpy man who “doesn’t really do Christmas.”

But after he receives an sizable holiday payout at work, his wife (starring Morgana Robinson) talks him into splurging the cash on a vacation to Lapland.

There’s just one problem—he discovers there was an mix-up with his bonus, which should have been £800, and he has to figure out how to return the remainder.

Pleasant yet unmemorable.

Festive score: 🎄🎄

Early Afternoon: Champagne Problems

This is one of those Christmas films where the tree, fairy lights and snow are in the setting—Christmas is the scene of the film rather than its raison d’etre—but it feels cosy and festive all the same.

Ambitious executive Sydney (played by Minka Kelly) is assigned to a vineyard to do a deal for a champagne business. On the way, she meets a guy in a book store who offers to show her a festive Paris.

A commentator recently declared this is the finest new Christmas film of the last several seasons. That’s a bit of a overstatement, but it is a Christmas romance with a hint of sophistication and gives the obligatory warm and fuzzy feels.

The scene with a detailed conversation about Die Hard is very good too.

Festive score: 🎄🎄🎄

3.29pm - Finding Father Christmas

Sixteen-year-old Chris, played by Lenny Rush, continues to believe in Father Christmas, regardless of the attempts of his dad (played by James Buckley) to tell him the reality.

The answer is somewhere, and Chris sets out to find it with the assistance of a panel of well-known figures.

It’s gentle but charming, and good viewing while waiting for Santa to visit.

Christmas tree rating: 🎄🎄🎄

Late Afternoon: Oh. What. Fun.

Michelle Pfeiffer is the head of a bickering American family who gather for the holidays—including other Oscar nominee Felicity Jones, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jason Schwartzman, and dad Denis Leary.

Pfeiffer opens by name-dropping classic festive films like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, It’s A Wonderful Life and Home Alone, before declaring: “They need to make a movie about the unsung heroes of the holidays—moms.”

So that’s what this is, but in practice it’s really a mash-up of those aforementioned movies, at least until Pfeiffer’s character eventually comes into her own.

Christmas tree rating: 🎄🎄

6.43pm - A Scottish Christmas Secret

The day’s waned in quality, but fortunately here’s a new offering in the saturated market of cliched, saccharine, over-the-top—and strangely compelling—festive fodder.

It’s a narrative as old as time: An American woman travels to a picturesque cold country and ends up finding romance.

In this case, Caprice Bourret plays a publisher