Six cups of hot cocoa A half-dozen new holiday flicks worth watching By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 12:10 PM CST Friday, Dec. 15, 2023

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This article was published 15/12/2023 (684 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

According to Entertainment Weekly’s Christmas movie tracker, there are 116 new festive films out right now, available through the Hallmark and Lifetime channels and across various streaming services.

There isn’t enough hot cocoa in the world to get through them all, but here’s a small seasonal selection.

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OK, technically Repeat Performance is not new, but this 1947 thriller — currently featured in the Criterion Channel’s Holiday Noir lineup — has been recently restored and re-released.

Billed as a kind of anti-It’s a Wonderful Life, it centres on an alt-universe-type festive miracle — but with murder.

The drama is set among New York theatre people on New Year’s Eve, so everyone’s wearing mink stoles and drinking highballs and going to fabulous parties.

In the opening scene, a Broadway star (Joan Leslie) shoots her playwright husband (Louis Hayward), then immediately wishes she could go back, live the year over again and fix her mistakes, a desire that’s tragicomically at odds with the noir genre’s dark sense of fatalism.

● Who should watch: Movie fans who like their holiday flicks sardonic, alcoholic and glamorous.

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In Candy Cane Lane (Prime Video), Eddie Murphy plays family man Chris Carver. Chris is that staple of holiday comedies, the hyper-competitive Christmas dad, and his dedication to the yuletide spirit has just been turbocharged by the lure of a hefty cash prize for the best holiday décor.

Ignoring a sign he keeps driving past — which reads, “Comparison is the thief of joy” — Chris decides to one-up his neighbours by making a deal with a renegade elf (Jillian Bell).

This arrangement results in The Twelve Days of Christmas song coming to life in utterly deranged ways. (The six geese a-laying are just bizarre and don’t even start with the maids a-milking.)

As Chris’s long-suffering wife Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross) remarks: “It doesn’t feel magical. It feels terrifying.”

● Who should watch: For folks who feel holiday movies are too pat and predicable, this one is nutty as a fruitcake. And as with fruitcake, this is a flick some people will love and some people will hate.

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In Best. Christmas. Ever! (Netflix), Heather Graham is Charlotte, a frustrated inventor whose life hasn’t turned out quite the way she expected.

Charlotte dreads getting the annual Christmas newsletter from her old college pal Jackie (R&B star Brandy Norwood), a multi-page booklet detailing the extraordinary achievements of her perfect family.

Are these letters “smug and boastful” or photoshopped frauds? Charlotte will get a chance to investigate when she and her family accidentally end up at Jackie’s place for the holidays (darn you, GPS!).

What follows is standard Christmas-movie fare: a town-square nativity pageant, a couple of precocious kids and some eggnog-sweet lessons about love and friendship, all marred by an uncomfortable and abrupt tonal shift.

● Who should watch: People who hate getting braggy holiday newsletters.

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Adapted from the much-loved 1921 children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit (Apple TV+) is a slow, quiet, gentle short film.

The British filmmaking crew combines low-key live-action and whimsical animation to tell the story of the deep bond between an introverted little boy (Phoenix Larouche), struggling to make friends at his new school, and a stuffed rabbit (Alex Lawther) who longs to become real.

● Who should watch: Shy kids, lovers of vintage knitwear and parents longing for simpler holidays, back when children were happy to get a handkerchief and an orange in their stocking.

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On the other hand, if you want to lean into the hyper pace of the season, Merry Little Batman (Prime Video) could be the fast, frantic children’s cartoon for you.

Batman (voiced by Luke Wilson) is a hapless, semi-retired superhero and an overprotective single dad to Damian (Yonas Kibreab), an eight-year-old ball of energy eager to start fighting crime alongside his father.

When Batman is called out on Christmas Eve, Damian ends up in a Home Alone-style showdown with some Gotham City villains, the resulting chaos getting a boost from the flick’s super-stylized, anarchistic animation style.

● Who should watch: DC fans of all ages who will get the jokes about Joel Schumacher’s sexed-up Batsuit, Mr. Freeze’s trying-too-hard one-liners and Christopher Nolan’s depressive Dark Knight (“Remember what your therapist said about your brooding,” Batman reminds himself at one point).

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The Holdovers (currently a premium rental on Prime Video, Apple TV or Google Play) reunites director Alexander Payne (Sideways) and star Paul Giamatti, here playing Paul Hunham, a cantankerous history teacher at an exclusive prep school who finds the outside world “a bitter and complicated place.”

He mutters about his students (“rancid little philistines,” “fetid layabouts,” “hormonal vulgarians”) and assigns readings on the Peloponnesian war over the holiday break.

This is a Christmas story, though, so when Paul is stuck at the empty school with the dining hall manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who has just lost her son in the Vietnam War, and an awkward, difficult boy (Dominic Sessa) left behind by his parents, this tale of loss and loneliness gradually, incrementally shades into a humane and maybe even hopeful affirmation of the power of small compassions.

● Who should watch: If you need some holiday consolation, this moving, melancholy film — which is getting some Oscar buzz — could become a new Blue Christmas classic.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca