This is one movie I’m not going to beat around the bush about—it’s a delightful holiday fairy tale that is tender without the treacle, a fantasy while still being grounded, and doesn’t take itself so seriously that it loses its ability to be unashamed entertainment. A Princess For Christmas is a fun melting pot that takes the familiar and creates its own magic.
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This review for A Holiday Engagement almost didn’t get written. Why? Well, that’s what we’re here to talk about. In any form of storytelling, one of the worst thing you can do is…
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In a nutshell, the premise is 2006’s The Holiday except played with different situations/characters. It basically is about two people finding unexpected romance after they swap homes for the holidays. However, while the premise is familiar, this isn’t just a slapdash redux of the previous film.
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Crystal is an ambition-challenged woman who is unexpectedly united with a girl’s letter to Santa. In the letter, the girl asks for a new wife for her dad, one that would also be a suitable follow-on to her revered late-mother. When greeted by fate in this way, what’s a poor rich woman to do?
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Silver Bells, a Hallmark Hall of Fame production, gives us a solid holiday movie that his more deftly written than most. While carrying with it the necessary tropes that attach themselves to most holiday films, they aren’t fumbled as is often the case with some of the less well crafted movies of the genre.
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Sometimes life gives you lemons. Huge, lemonade-defying lemons. When your husband of dubious life choices takes everything of worth and runs off with some vixen who has caught his eye, leaving you with three kids, no home, a tank of a car, and the clothes on your back…well, those are some pretty darned big lemons. This is where we find Martha Evens in A Christmas Wish.
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In A Christmas Wedding Tail, two dogs are the reason a job-seeking widow with three young boys meets and has a romance with a widower vintner with two girls. It’s a match made in “what could possibly go wrong” land?
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Santa Claus sued for emotion distress? An earnest but untested lawyer? A lovable little girl? No, this isn’t an iconic street between 33rd and 35th. And that’s good. That’s already been done so well that the copies have only been poor imitations. Still, there is a lot that is familiar in The Case For Christmas.
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It seems to happen every Christmas: your beloved uncle brings home a perfect-for-you stranger just before the holiday and he makes your ill-suited boyfriend suspicious and jealous. Amazingly, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year does better than most at keeping an entertaining balance.
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This is what happens if you take equal parts A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life and set it in Ireland with the protagonist being a doctor who has sworn off love and is instead becoming married to her career.
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Following a young woman in this period piece, An Old-Fashioned Christmas, opts to break out of the traditional formula for a holiday film and delivers, instead, a solid story filled with choices, consequences, love, disappointment, greed, and good old-fashioned humanity. The question is: does it deliver on the holiday theme?
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Calling Miracle on 34th Street a Christmas classic is a lot like calling chocolate just another candy. Some movies stand head-and-shoulders above the rest, and this classic stands even higher than that in the holiday pantheon.
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