Holly jolly streaming

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/12/2024 (308 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

December is here, along with the “Under the Mistletoe” listings on your favourite streaming services.

Everyone has their own way of watching Christmas movies. Maybe you sincerely adore romances between young women who run imperiled small-town cookie shops and cynical big-city executives from national bakery chains. Or maybe you’re just in it for the drinking games. (Impromptu snowball fight— shot! Hot cocoa — shot!)

However you like your holiday fare, here’s the lowdown on some of this season’s newest movies and shows.

(And remember, everything is graded on a Christmas curve.)

IF YOU’RE IN THE ‘DIE HARD IS A CHRISTMAS MOVIE’ CAMP

If your idea of holiday cheer is some gun-crazy counterprogramming, the new Netflix series Black Doves combines the Dickensian trappings of a London Christmas with an extremely high body count.

Keira Knightley stars as Helen, perfect wife to a Tory cabinet minister, perfect mother to beautiful twins — and a deep-cover spy working for an enigmatic organization run by “Mrs. Reed” (Happy Valley’s Sarah Lancashire). This Christmas, Helen’s past is catching up with her, and to get out alive, she’ll need some help from onetime colleague Sam (Ben Whishaw), a troubled triggerman with his own dangerous history.

As the dark, funny, stylish and self-consciously over-the-top action unspools, the twinkly lights, festive ornaments, holiday shops, school nativity plays and the song Santa Baby all take on a sinister edge. (OK, Santa Baby was already a little creepy.)

Realism-wise, the depiction of paid assassins and shadowy underworld organizations hews closer to John Wick than John le Carré, but the violent, improbable twists and turns make for a fun, festive free-for-all.

BONUS: If you know Whishaw as the voice of the world’s sweetest bear in the Paddington flicks and Knightley as the silently adored bride in Love, Actually, your expectations are going to get a bone-crunching reset.

RATING: 4 out of 5 candy canes

---

IF YOU LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT. OR TRAVIS KELCE. OR EGGNOG

Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story features a romance between a pretty blond woman and a bearded guy who works for the Kansas City Chiefs.

No, not Swelce.

This Hallmark holiday movie (available to stream through Stack TV) follows a photogenic, football-adjacent, completely fictional couple — Alana (Hunter King), who’s competing for the Chiefs’ fan-of-the-year award, and Derrick (Tyler Hynes), the Chiefs’ director of fan engagement.

Alana’s whole history is bound up with “Christmas, football and fate,” her family’s love for the team and love for the holidays — they celebrate “Christmas Eve Eve Eve” — being tied to a magical hat that must be worn during Dec. 25 games to ensure a Chiefs’ victory.

Derrick, on the other hand, is skeptical about sports superstitions and — thanks to a childhood spent in European hotels — has no yuletide traditions of his own.

Cue the comically meddlesome grandparents, the cookie decorating, the tree lighting and the visit to the skating rink. Alana learns she doesn’t need a hat — the magic has been there all along — and Derrick learns to believe in destiny, in a story that is basically a cheery, shiny advert for the NFL, the Kansas City tourist board and Big Eggnog.

BONUS: Football fans will get a kick out of cameos by current and former players and coaching staff, as well some drop-ins by Donna Kelce, Travis and Jason’s mom.

RATING: 2½ out of 5 candy canes

---

IF YOU THINK POOR THINGS NEEDED MORE FESTIVE CONTENT

In Hot Frosty (now on Netflix), Christmas-movie regular Lacey Chabert plays Kathy, a young widow who runs the local diner in the impossibly picturesque town of Hope Springs. When she wraps a magical red scarf around a snowman, he comes to life — buck naked and knowing absolutely nothing of the human world.

Jack (Dustin Milligan), as he comes to be called, starts out with the mind of a wide-eyed toddler and the body of a Chippendales dancer, which could be an ooky premise.

Fortunately, he’s a “fast learner” and immediately picks up everything he needs to know about food, clothes, love and life from TV. Plus, he gets a lot of eager, enthusiastic, goofball charm from Canadian actor Milligan, best known as “Hot Vet” on Schitt’s Creek.

Hot Frosty packs in a lot of the entries from your Christmas Movie Bingo Card, including cookie baking, decking the halls and a dressing-room montage, as we wait to see whether Kathy’s heart will thaw before Jack’s body melts.

BONUS: Brooklyn Nine-Nine alums Craig Robinson and Joe Lo Truglio offer some comic relief as the town’s appealingly hapless law enforcement officers.

RATING: 3 out of 5 candy canes

---

IF YOU LIKE YOUR CHRISTMAS MOVIES WITH AN INDIE VIBE

Nutcrackers (on Disney+) sounds at first like a standard assembly-line product of the Christmas Industrial Complex. Michael (Ben Stiller), an uptight, workaholic urbanite in the middle of a multimillion-dollar business deal, must head to a ramshackle farmhouse in rural Ohio to care for his four orphaned nephews (played by the real-life Janson brothers) — at least until the boys can be placed in a foster home.

It being only three weeks until Christmas, we all know how this is going to go. Even though Michael’s late sister has described him as “incapable of love,” he will discover there’s more to life than making money. And the children, who seem at first to be towheaded terrors, will turn out to be lovely little weirdos.

Nutcrackers might sound formulaic, but it feels a bit indie, thanks to a loose, lo-fi, purposely aimless narrative and some oddball direction by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, Halloween Kills).

Before he started doing franchise expansions, Green made poetic, mysterious small films, and we get glints of that here in long-sequence shots of the kids just goofing around — playing on the roof, making bonfires and hijacking tractors.

Not every scene works, there are way too many fart jokes, and it’s not exactly fun for the whole family — Disney offers warnings for strong language and “intensely suggestive dialogue.” But there is some low-key humour, some poignant drama and a truly sweet, uncynical holiday finish as the boys put on a handmade version of The Nutcracker ballet.

BONUS: The not-so-traditional festive soundtrack covers everything from Bach and Tchaikovsky to Prince and the Lightning Seeds.

RATING: 3 ½ out of 5 candy canes