Folks, Christmas was exactly one month ago, so what a perfect time to wrap up our 12 Days of Christmas movies series! For our final Christmas movie of the season, we’re talking about Silent Night. This is an action movie directed by John Woo and starring Joel Kinnaman as Brian Godlock. One Christmas, Brian is playing with his son in his front yard when a couple of speeding cars drive by and his son gets caught in the crossfire and is shot and killed. Now, one Christmas later, Brian is out for revenge.

This movie marks John Woo’s return to American film for the first time since 2003’s Paycheck, but to me, the director really peaked with the 1997 classic film Face/Off. There’s also a 2021 Christmas film called Silent Night that I really enjoyed. So how will Silent Night live up to these other movies? Well…

Christmas may be in our rearview mirror, but we’ve still got Christmas movies to talk about, friends. And I don’t think we can reflect on the 2023 Christmas season without discussing The Holdovers, one of the bigger Christmas movies to come out this winter. And it’s also getting a lot of awards season buzz. But is it so good that it deserves to become a part of the Christmas canon? Let’s run it through the patented Christmas Movie Scale to find out!

We’re almost halfway through January, but there are still more Christmas movies to watch! Lesbian Christmas movies, at that. And no, not that lesbian Christmas movie. There are other ones, you know. Ones that aren’t mean to Kristen Stewart. For instance, Looking for Her.

Taylor (Olivia Buckle) hasn’t been home for Christmas in years. Not since she came out to her parents and they didn’t take it very well. But now her parents want to make amends, and they invite her home for the holidays. And just to show how much they want to welcome Taylor back into their lives, they invite her to bring her girlfriend as well. There’s only one problem. Taylor and her girlfriend aren’t together anymore. Rather than admit it didn’t work out, Taylor finds the perfect solution: she puts out an ad for an actor to play her girlfriend over the holidays. Turns out this is the perfect gig for struggling actor Olive (Alexandra Swarens). But what happens when fake dating turns into… not so fake dating?

Let’s put this one through the Christmas movie rating scale and see how it does.

Did you feel like we needed another retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol? Well, I guess somebody did, because here we are. Spirited is a new take on A Christmas Carol with quite a few twists. First of all, it’s a musical. Second, it reimagines the whole ghost of Christmas future/past/present thing as a whole afterlife business. It kinda has a The Good Place vibe about it. These ghosts are tasked with finding one lost soul and making them “good” over the course of one Christmas Eve, just like they did with Ebenezer Scrooge. So, really, it’s less of a retelling and more of a reimagining/sequel. You get it? Good.

Picture this: you’re on a train just trying to commute to work and maybe enjoy a lil podcast and/or crossword puzzle along the way. You’re minding your own business. Then, out of nowhere, some dude you see every day on the train invites you to help you plan a big Christmas party for everyone on the train. What do you do?

If you say you’d plan a new route to work from then on, you’re my people. But that’s not what happens in the very British Christmas film This is Christmas. After seeing his fellow commuters stick up for a guy on the train who lost his ticket, Adam (Alfred Enoch) gets a brilliant (?) idea. Clearly all of these people on the train are human beings with feelings. And human beings love to party! So why not have a big Christmas party for everyone on the train. He will not be providing the venue or the food or the spirits, but he is providing general good vibes. WHO IS IN?

Not me. Not at all. But let’s run this guy through the Christmas scale and see what happens.

On Christmas day, I felt the need to watch the most conventional, Hallmark-style Christmas movie I could possibly find. And that’s why I turned on Reporting for Christmas, a film as uninventive as its title. Mary Romero is a serious, big city gal/hardworking reporter. So when she’s assigned a “puff piece,” looking at the history of a Christmas toy manufacturer in a small town, she’s less than thrilled.

Silver fox toymaker Blake Johnson is equally unexcited about the prospect of featuring his toys on the news. After all, the big evil news company is likely to spin the story in a way that exploits their small town and the very serious toy making business they have going. But what happens when they meet and… fall in love (I guess)? Will Christmas sparks fly or will this movie continue to be boring AF?

Let’s score this bad boy and find out.