Mainlining Christmas

They Live by Night is one of several crime noir films Criterion is streaming this year for the holidays. It tells the story of young lovers on the run from the law. I was on the fence about writing this up. Because the movie's timeline is fairly nebulous, it's not at all clear what portion is set around Christmas. A fourteen or fifteen-minute section starting just after the middle definitely is and you could interpret the entirety of what comes before as being in December, but you could just as easily assume the earlier scenes are in October or November. It just isn't clear. The tie-breaker, of course, came down to some thematic connections, but even these aren't clear-cut. More on all that later. The main characters are Bowie (played by Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell). Bowie just broke out of prison with the help of two older criminals, T-Dub and Chicamaw. They're staying at a service station run by Keechie's father, who's assisting them i

Fairly high concept for a Hallmark movie, this is about a screenwriter scripting a remake of a classic Hollywood Christmas movie getting magically transported back to the production of said movie in 1947 and falling in love with its tragically doomed star. If all that sounds a tad over-ambitious for a studio known for cranking out relatively uniform (but surprisingly high-quality) low-budget television movies... well... that is an issue here. While A Biltmore Christmas is decent, it's clear they're biting off a bit more than they can chew. Watching, you can tell everyone involved is putting in real effort, but you can see where they just didn't have the time to set up complex shots, learn more than surface-level impersonations of characters from classic Hollywood films, or nail the look and feel of the era they were emulating. I don't think any of that is necessarily a dealbreaker, depending on what you want out of this. This is, after all, a TV Christmas movie, and in

While looking for background on the 1939 movie of the same name, I saw a Wikipedia article about this. I clicked through expecting to find a remake but discovered the two movies were completely unconnected. Much to my surprise, this coincidentally is also a Christmas movie (more so, in fact). The 1970s are probably the decade we've explored the least, so I was excited to find a movie I never knew existed from the era. Or at least I was until I started watching it. To be fair, I'm not at all certain that this is actually bad or if the style of humor is simply so grounded in the era it was made that it feels alien to someone watching fifty years later. I suppose the distinction is largely academic: either way, this isn't something virtually anyone is going to be interested in sitting through today. The movie is written by its two costars, Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna, a married couple whose prior screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. That one was based on a play t

After watching Red Snow, I find myself a little surprised it's not better known, which is another way of saying I had a blast watching it. This is a horror/comedy vampire movie, and - honestly - that's about all I want to tell you before dropping a *spoiler warning* and advising those of you who like this sort of thing to check it out. Okay, I'll toss you a few more bones, in case you need more convincing. Or, in the case of those of you who are die-hard horror fans, perhaps a warning to temper your expectations. After all, this is a movie *I* really enjoyed, and - in case you've forgotten - I don't exactly have the best tolerance for scares, gore, and the like. Red Snow is absolutely the kind of R-rated horror movie that elicits complaints about not being gross or scary enough for a significant subset of the genre's fanbase. If that's a deal-breaker for you, you're probably better off skipping this. But for the rest of you, it's delightful. And, for

I'm stretching to discuss this here - the combined time spent on the holidays (in this case a couple different New Year's Eves) accounts for a minuscule portion of the overall runtime. Granted, those moments are thematically important and one of them closes the film, but even so, I wouldn't review a modern movie with this little seasonal screentime. But The Divorcee was released in 1930, making it one of the earliest talkies with any holiday connections I've located, and it was extremely successful at the time, picking up nominations for Best Picture, Director, Writer, and winning Best Actress for Norma Shearer. And while it feels very different than later Hollywood genres, elements of the structure resonate with modern romantic comedies (though this is definitely a drama). And seeing as one of those elements is the aforementioned New Year's Eve conclusion, I felt like I should discuss it. Shearer plays Jerry, a woman destined to be the titular divorcee, though the

Last year we made time to review a decent number of Hallmark holiday movies and found the recent entries quite a bit better on average than we expected. The best of the bunch was Hanukkah on Rye , a delightful classic romantic comedy I found funny and sweet. The movie received a bit of backlash due to what some viewers felt were stereotypes  but otherwise seemed to be well received, so it's not too surprising to see a new entry this year. What is surprising is the premise: rather than play it safe with another straightforward romcom, Round and Round is a time loop movie in the vein of Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, both of which are namechecked and discussed by characters in Round and Round as they try to figure out the temporal disturbance at the movie's core. I'll cut to the chase and reveal I don't think Round and Round is in quite the same league as its predecessor, but it's nevertheless a solid TV movie and - largely by default - probably the second-best Hanukk

Despite not having a particularly complicated plot or premise, Sun Valley Serenade is the kind of movie that you almost have to see to believe. I say "almost" because, while there's a lot to like here, some dated stylistic elements hold it back from crossing that line into unconditional recommendation territory. It comes close, mainly thanks to the mid-movie sequences in which... well.... Okay, here's the thing: this movie occupies a very unusual place on the spectrum of movies best seen unspoiled. There's a delightful twist in tone and point of view that's entirely unintentional. Audiences in 1941 were already in on something that those watching eight decades later won't be, and it recontextualizes the movie in some fascinating ways. So, if you're a really big fan of romantic comedies from this era and have a high tolerance for musical numbers that are mostly video recordings of famous performers playing instruments (a substantial portion of this movi

It's actually a little weird I've never seen this before. I was in high school when Grumpy Old Men came out in 1993, so the fact I never bothered seeing it on VHS or even caught it on television is a little unusual. Likewise, it has to be one of the most famous Christmas movies that somehow fell through the cracks this long. Part of that has to do with the fact it intentionally downplays some aspects of the holidays - more on that later - despite absolutely qualifying as a Christmas movie. The movie's primary selling point and presumably its reason for being made is its cast. The film stars Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as the titular grumpy old men, and if there's a reason to see this, it's them. Whether that's enough or not is a more difficult question. The movie is right on the line between "not quite good enough" and "just good enough." Frustratingly, it contains moments and elements of greatness it can't quite maintain. Lemmon and M

The first thing that jumped out about this 1943 French Christmas film was that it's a movie released in France in 1943. History was never my best subject, but even I know France was occupied by Nazi Germany during that time, which raised a substantial number of questions, some of which I've found answers for and some I haven't. The first and most relevant is confirmation that this is, in fact, a French film, as opposed to a Nazi film made in France. The director, Claude Autant-Lara, seems to have hated the occupation, and his work at the time is seen as fairly progressive. I should pause to highlight the significance of the phrase "at that time," because it doesn't take much time on Wikipedia to find that in later years Autant-Lara's politics mutated into something disturbingly similar to Nazis, complete with right-wing nationalism and antisemitism. He was actually elected to Parliament in the late '80s, though he didn't stick around long - some p

There have been a substantial number of Christmas romcoms released direct to streaming over the past few years, too many for us to even try keeping up with. We attempt to get around to the most notable ones, but even then it's felt like a race against a malfunctioning automated assembly line. Christmas at the Ranch got on our radar because it's one of a small (though thankfully not as small as it once was) number of LGBTQ+ holiday movies. For better or worse, that turns out to be most of what makes Christmas at the Ranch different from the scores of other Christmas romcoms: aside from the fact both leads are women, this is fairly generic as far as these things go. I'm aware that can be a selling point to a number of people who love the subgenre and have been starved for representation. There's nothing wrong with making what amounts to a Hallmark romcom with a lesbian couple, since Hallmark's been slow to meet that demand (to be fair, they've made a few now, but