| It’s always hit or miss when Hallmark takes on a niche subject and turns it into their typical romance. Melt My Heart This Christmas is an unfortunate miss when they take the world of glass blowing and set a romance around an awful caricature of an evil boss. Ruining a movie with just one character is hard to do, and not helped by having no real details. | 2025 Directed by: Amy Force Screenplay by: Ansley Gordon Starring: Laura Vandervoort, Stephen Huszar | |
| Last year, Hallmark had a Kansas City Chiefs holiday love story. I didn’t see it, but I’ve learned that it was extremely successful and was their most-watched movie of the Christmas season by a lot. Unsurprisingly, they’ve added a new movie to that series with Buffalo up this year. Holiday Touchdown: A Bills Love Story just pours on the holiday romance with special guests: past and present Buffalo Bills players, and the city of Buffalo. | 2025 Directed by: Dustin Rikert Screenplay by: Vanessa Marano, Danielle Morrow Starring: Holland Roden, Matthew Daddario | |
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Christmas-y, queer, and uneven around the edges. |
| As gay Christmas romances start to become more common, it also means we can probably start to become a little more critical. The Christmas Writer is unpolished. It hits on many of the traditional Christmas rom-com beats but does so from a new angle and a fresh voice, but also with unflattering lighting, bad acting, and choppy editing. | 2025 Directed by: Christin Baker Screenplay by: Christin Baker, Katie I. Williams Starring: Shelby Allison Brown, Callie Bussell | |
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Tender, warm-hearted and real. |
| A drama about life -- real life for real adults. Blue Eyed Girl is a sweet, tender, charming portrait of a 40-year-old woman hitting a mid-life crisis and re-examining her life when she has to go take care of her ailing father, stay with her two feuding and polar opposite sisters, all while reconnecting with a childhood flame and the one that got away. | 2025 Directed by: J. Mills Goodloe Screenplay by: Marisa Coughlin Starring: Marisa Coughlin, Eliza Coupe, Beau Bridges and Sam Trammell | |
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Sweet and cute and hokey. |
| The Christmas Ticket is a sweet, feel-good, classic Christmas rom-com even if it is a bit hokey and slow. Alana (Violet Bennett) grew up poor with a constantly moving father after her mother died, gradually losing touch with her grandfather. Years later as an adult, Alana might be a bit more settled in New York City but she’s still broke and jobless and then she finds out she’s the benefactor of her recently departed grandfather’s cabin. | 2025 Directed by: Vincenzo Conrorio Screenplay by: Vincenzo Conrorio Starring: Violet Bennet, Travis Laughlin | |
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A bland Christmas romance showing off how little they know about anything. |
| Marketed as a Christmas rom-com, the Netflix movie Champagne Problems is a bland romantic drama set during the Christmas holidays but with a plot that could (and arguably should) take place any other time of the year. It takes so many things that romances love: vague business executives, wine, Paris, and… sons who don’t connect with their fathers? It’s hard to tell if it’s trying to be different but falls into formulaic traps, or if it’s trying to be formulaic and accidentally includes non-cliché elements. | 2025 Directed by: Mark Steven Johnson Screenplay by: Mark Steven Johnson Starring: Minka Kelly, Tom Wozniczka | |
| A Christmas movie about making the cliché Christmas movie is starting to become more common than the actual cliché Christmas movies. Making fun of a movie to then make a worse version of that movie, isn’t all that funny or clever. Hallmark has satirized themselves a few times to better effect than whatever this is. | 2025 Directed by: Collins Abbott White Screenplay by: Brian S. Tedeschi, Vicki Vass Starring: Kabby Borders, Tom Gipson | |
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A murder mystery with no intrigue. |
| Murder at the Embassy is a sequel to 2023’s Invitation to a Murder, a movie that has stayed with me over the years despite its many flaws due to the strength of the lead character. You don’t often see indies get sequels, but I’m glad this one did. Mischa Barton’s Miranda Green deserves more screen time. If Daniel Craig can keep solving more murders in the 2020s, why can’t she in the 1930s? | 2025 Directed by: Stephen Shimek Screenplay by: Mark Brennan, Alex Davison, Douglas Beauvois Starring: Mischa Barton | |
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Formulaic rom-com with maturity and gen-X humour. |
| Kate (Alicia Silverstone) and Everett (Oliver Hudson) are getting divorced. Except it's going to be a friendly, amicable divorce; a "conscious uncoupling" even though all the townspeople make fun of them for using that phrase. They're still going to have Christmas together, a separation isn't going to change the fact that they're still a family (Kate has 'custody' of Everett's two dads). It's their last Christmas with their youngest son still at home before he goes off to college. | 2025 Directed by: Steve Carr Screenplay by: Holly Hester Starring: Alicia Silverstone, Oliver Hudson | |
| A Keller Christmas Vacation doesn’t quite fit any of the typical Hallmark modes. It has a simplistic premise, but does not have a simplistic setting, which kind of makes for an odd mix. A family with three adult siblings are spending Christmas on a river cruise on the Danube. Filmed on location in Christmas markets across Germany and Austria, Hallmark usually saves their more expensive and elaborate productions for a grander story. | 2025 Directed by: Maclain Nelson Screenplay by: Maclain Nelson Starring: Jonathan Bennett, Brandon Routh, Eden Sher | |
| Ted Cooper is a great character. A relentlessly positive and optimistic man who greets every day with a smile and every little disaster with a laugh. It’s a bold move naming the movie after the fictional lead, but Robert Buckley makes this work. Ted never comes across as annoying but rather the friend that everyone wants in their life. | 2025 Directed by: Jason Bourque Screenplay by: Russell Hainline Starring: Robert Buckley, Kimberley Sustad | |
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Western drama with romance, an implausible story, and inconsistent characters. |
| Where the Wind Blows is western romance with an undefined setting (presumably 19th century, somewhere out west), and a unique story, but unable to get the pieces or characters necessary to fill out that story into something plausible, or even interesting or entertaining. Trevor Donovan stars as a single, untethered cowboy named Chase Logan. | 2025 Directed by: John Schimke Screenplay by: Caroline Fyffe, Mike Maden, John Schimke Starring: Trevor Donovan, Ashley Elaine | |
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A simplistic rom-com that can’t maintain interest. |
| You’ve Got Mail has become its own subgenre within the romantic comedy, to the point that some movies will just take that loose concept but present it very differently (like Hallmark’s surprising anti-AI rom-com Return to Office) or take the exact same plot pretty much verbatim but just the industry it’s set in, which is what Amazon’s Maintenance Required has done. | 2025 Directed by: Lacey Uhlemeyer Screenplay by: Erin Falconer & Lacey Uhlemeyer, and Roo Berry Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Jacob Scipio | |
| There is usually a maturity even if simplistic to most Hallmark romances, but that is nowhere to be found in their back-to-school / football-themed Home Turf. The movie, which I believe is supposed to be funny, features football players moving in with the uptight school’s president after their dorm floor is flooded. It falls to the handsome coach to smooth things over. | 2025 Directed by: MacIain Nelson Screenplay by: Gregg Rossen, Brian Sawyer Starring: Nikki Deloach, Warren Christie | |
| Adventures in Love & Birding merges the perfect hobby with Hallmark’s romance and fall theme. While I’m not a birder myself, I appreciate birding, and I suspect many of Hallmark’s audience is either an avid birder themselves or at least an enjoyer from afar. Complete with some bird photography, bird puns and trivia, it’s a whole-hearted push on the hobby. | 2025 Directed by: Michael Robison Screenplay by: Nicole Baxter, Sarah T. Dubb Starring: Andrew Walker, Rachel Boston | |
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Today’s politics but in a purely entertaining, hilarious and exhilarating thrill ride. |
| There’s a line from one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s earlier movies, Revolutionary Road, that I love and was reminded of during this movie. “I can never remember, are you the young Wheelers on Revolutionary Road, or the young revolutionaries on Wheeler Road?” And for the sake of One Battle After Another, it is indeed the young revolutionaries. Revolutionaries who fought the man, committed crimes, had a baby and grew up. | 2025 Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson Screenplay by: Paul Thomas Anderson Based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Infiniti Chase, Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn | |
| James McAvoy is making his directorial debut with a based on a true story that I would love to say is too crazy to be true, but instead, it’s the exact right level to be believable. Two rappers from Dundee, Scotland who are desperate to be famous with many cold calls going unanswered finally land an audition for a talent scout from London (or as Billy says “London, England? Where the English people are?”). | 2025 Directed by: James McAvoy Screenplay by: Elaine Gracie, Archie Thomson Based on the story by Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd Starring: Seamus McLean Ross, Samuel Bottomley | |
| The one thing that is instantly clear about The Fence is that it is based on a play. It takes place in one location with a limited number of characters. The whole movie is a conversation between Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé), a brother of an African man killed on site of a British construction company, and on the other side of the fence, Horn (Matt Dillon), the supervisor of the British construction company. | 2025 Directed by: Claire Denis Screenplay by: Claire Denis, Suzanne Lindon, Andrew Litvack Starring: Matt Dillon, Isaach de Bankolé | |
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A unique and powerful film about identity and the war in Venezuela. |
| The power of It Would Be Night in Caracas sneaks up on you. A story so important and universal, you very slowly get more and more enraptured until you’re left shaking marvelling at what you have just watched. It’s a story that affects approximately 8 million Venezuelans living in exile that the rest of the world might not realize the depths of the horror because it is not actually considered war, even though that is exactly what it is. | 2025 Directed by: Mariana Rondón, Marité Ugas Screenplay by: Mariana Rondón, Marité Ugas, and Karina Sainz Borgo Starring: Natalia Reyes, Edgar Ramirez | |
| Grace (Barbie Ferreira) is a young, idealistic music critic who is moving from Toronto to Montreal to make it big and because Montreal is cool and Toronto is not cool. That’s me paraphrasing the main character who is as immature and self-absorbed as coming-of-age rom-com heroines are. There’s a reason this type of low-confidence but high-selfishness protagonist is popular – because they’re funny. | 2025 Directed by: Chandler Levack Screenplay by: Chandler Levack Starring: Barbie Ferreira, Stanley Simons | |
| 10-year-old Rabia (Nazualiya Arsalan) is getting ready for school and remarks that her uniform is too short. They don’t have money for a new one, so just rip out the bottom hem stitches and it will appear longer, her mother suggests. That works for Rabia, a very sweet, courteous and inquisitive young girl who loves school. When she arrives at school, it’s closed, an official is telling everyone that the teacher has fallen ill because the school is haunted so it has to shut down. | 2025 Directed by: Seemab Gul Screenplay by: Seemab Gul Starring: Nazualiya Arsalan | |
| For Colombians or for anybody with a personal connection to the November 6, 1985 Palace of Justice siege, Noviembre is likely a very powerful movie. However for the rest of us, this is just a chaotic capture of one moment in history with a lot of screaming and crying for an hour and a half. I would love to paint you a clearer picture, but there really isn’t one – both on purpose and to the detriment of the film. | 2025 Directed by: Tomás Corredor Screenplay by: Tomás Corredor, Jorge Goldenberg, Xenia Rivery Starring: Santiago Alarcón, Natalia Reyes | |
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A fun sequel with more chaos. |
| One of the hardest parts of creating a sequel 20-plus years later is recognizing who the target audience is. Is it for the same audience who are now 40-ish or is it for a new audience who does not know the original? Unsurprisingly, Freakier Friday tries to balance the two, satisfying both audiences without being wholly for either one. The original succeeded because of the cast and getting the exact same cast is a win for elder millennials. | 2025 Directed by: Nisha Ganatra Screenplay by: Jordan Weiss, Elyse Hollander and Mary Rodgers Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis | |
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A good character with no plot. |
| A story of a 13-year-old girl growing up in a new town, with new friends, a first crush, a head full of insecurities and realizing she has synesthesia. Thirteen is probably one of the hardest ages to center a movie around, primarily because it’s the hardest age to get natural acting from; they’re old enough to be self-aware but not experienced enough to know how to turn that into playing a character in front of a camera. | 2024 Directed by: Nicola Rose Screenplay by: Nicola Rose Starring: Shayelin Martin, Patrick McKenna | |
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Staid, unoriginal and uninteresting. |
| Diego Boneta has returned to his native Mexico in this Spanish-language seduction thriller. Titled Follow in English, the Spanish title Juegos de Seducción translates to “Seduction Games” which at least makes sense in addition to being a much better title. But this movie also doesn’t concern itself with what is good, or better, or makes sense. The plotline of a handsome con artist who scams wealthy women but may have found his match is about as lazy as they come. | 2025 Directed by: Gonzalo Tobal Screenplay by: Hipatia Argüero Mendoza, and Adriana Pelusi Starring: Diego Boneta, Martha Higareda | |
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Mystery, tension and humour all used to great effect in this pandemic horror. |
| Don’t Log Off is a COVID-set horror/thriller, and we’re talking early pandemic. Five years ago can seem like such a long time ago right now, so this can feel a little dated. The setting is arguably an easy excuse for the virtual set-up and why the whole group of friends who live in the same city are on-line and not in-person. But whether you consider this gimmicky or not, it works. | 2025 Directed by: Brandon Baer, Garrett Baer Screenplay by: Brandon Baer, Garrett Baer Starring: Kara Royster, Khylin Rambo, Luke Benward, Ariel Winter | |
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An enjoyable journey through song and complicated emotions. |
| A sweet, thoughtful and tender portrait of a young woman struggling to make it as a musician in the shadow of her famous father. Charlotte Lakes (Jessica Belkin) is the daughter of Jack Lakes, a successful rock star with one album who would have just faded away into obscurity but instead he died at the height of his fame, so now eight years later he’s a cult icon and Charlotte cannot escape his presence. | 2025 Directed by: Nick Wilson Screenplay by: Nick Wilson Starring: Jessica Belkin, Jacob Brand, Malin Akerman and Gavin Leatherwood | |
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A chaotic comedy that fizzles away its potential. |
| Let’s start with the cast, headlined by a dark-haired Anna Camp wearing electric blue eyeshadow playing a sex podcast host who’s turning 40 and married to her husband for 20 years. If you didn’t realize how long ago Pitch Perfect was, that sentence should clear that up. The Hangover alum Justin Bartha plays husband Jack, a quieter unassuming schoolteacher. They are joined by six friends for their birthday party which may or may not be their last night on Earth. | 2024 Directed by: Deena Kashper Screenplay by: Danny Kashper, Deena Kashper Starring: Justin Bartha, Anna Camp, Lucy Punch, Tawny Newsome and Ignacio Serricchio | |
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Western-horror with intriguing set-up but minimal story. |
| Forgive Us All is a New Zealand made western-horror drama set in a post-apocalyptic world where a virus has wiped out mankind turning humans into cannibalistic zombies. It’s interesting at times but also strange and has a hard time turning its theme into something compelling. Rory (Lily Sullivan) is bloody, sweaty and shaking with anger, fear and grief after just burying a family member. | 2025 Directed by: Jordana Stott Screenplay by: Lance Giles, Alex Makauskas, Jordana Stott Starring: Lily Sullivan, Lance Giles | |
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An Americanized, bastardized version of the buddy copy action comedy with bad writing, bad acting and bad jokes.. |
| In the Netherlands, the tile is “Bad BOA’s” where BOA is an acronym from the Dutch for a type of law enforcement officer. It is meant to make you think of Bad Boys even though Netflix changed the English title to Almost Cops. Whether they change the title or not, this movie is still a lazy knock-off of a mix between Bad Boys and 21 Jump Street. | 2025 Directed by: Gonzalo Fernandez Carmona Screenplay by: Kenneth Asporaat, Michel Bonset, Murth Mossel Starring: Werner Kolf, Jandino Asporaat | |
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Smart and engaging thriller that lets in too much nonsense. |
| The German Netflix thriller Brick takes a smart, simple premise, builds something unique and engaging, and then temporarily goes insane before getting back to the only possible ending. What I love about movies like this is how unique and universal it is at the same time; it’s original and can appeal to anyone around the world. And it starts very strong with two characters fully defined within minutes and then suddenly locked in with no explanation. | 2025 Directed by: Philip Koch Screenplay by: Philip Koch Starring: Matthias Schweighöfer, Ruby O. Fee | |
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Illogical trash dressed up as artistic. |
| Movies where an older woman has an affair with a younger man that turns into an obsession is not a new genre. There are dozens of movies literally named "Obsession" that are exactly this. I am concerned though that Babygirl’s recent success both at the box office and with critics, will spurn more terrible movies like Pretty Thing that attempt to elevate the genre in ways that just don’t work. | 2025 Directed by: Justin Kelly Screenplay by: Jack Donnelly Starring: Alicia Silverstone, Karl Glusman | |
| A Machu Picchu Proposal features some poorly written characters and a lot beautiful Peruvian landmarks and landscapes. Katie (Rhiannon Fish) is a no-nonsense, everything is planned, type of girl, a very prototypical Hallmark heroine, but here she is joined by twin brother Dan (Christopher Vieira), who is exactly the same. There are two characters whose entire personalities are that they like plans and schedules and hates impulsiveness. | 2025 Directed by: Colin Theys Screenplay by: Juliana Wimbles Starring: Rhiannon Fish, Alec Santos | |
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About nothing so can’t be anything more than an action movie. |
| Off the Grid is about nothing. The plot summary has a pretty detailed premise: a scientist working for a company who wants to weaponize his research so he steals it and goes into hiding off the grid. It’s a solid premise with some good characters, but the problem is there is more information provided in that sentence than there is in the entire movie. So it’s about nothing. | 2025 Directed by: Johnny Martin Screenplay by: Jim Agnew Starring: Josh Duhamel, Greg Kinnear | |
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Trashy twists that actually lead to a happy ending. |
| The Stranger in My Home is the same team behind The Image of You (a campy trashy thriller about identical twins, schizophrenia and murder) by novelist Adele Parks and director Jeff Fisher. This one, a dramatic thriller about daughters switched at birth, is definitely the same genre, but a bit more grounded and while the twists do threaten to overshadow the drama, there are some solid developments as well. | 2025 Directed by: Jeff Fisher Screenplay by: Adele Parks, Chris Sivertson Starring: Sophia Bush, Amiah Miller, Chris Carmack, and Chris Johnson | |
| Sometimes Hallmark gets the little details right, and it is such a breath of fresh air when that happens. The Villa Amore filmmakers did their homework, and got all the details right – taking a real Italian initiative and turning it into as realistic a romance as possible (for the genre). You have to allow for some movie-only characters but the plot is reasonable that everything just easily falls into place. | 2025 Directed by: Clare Niederpruem Screenplay by: Alexandre Coscas, Nick Hopkins, Tim James Starring: Eloise Mumford, Kevin McGarry | |
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Dark comedy with some laughs and some extreme contrivances. |
| Don’t Tell Larry is an Office Space-esque dark comedy, like a cross between The Office meets Borderline. It’s not nearly as sharp as Office Space, not nearly as funny, so it does fall flat in comparison, but this is still a well made, reasonably funny dark tale about how a weird co-worker accidentally sends a pair of ambitious co-workers on a crime spree with way more dead bodies than there should be. | 2025 Directed by: Greg Porper, John Schimke Screenplay by: Greg Porper, John Schimke Starring: Patty Guggenheim, Kiel Kennedy | |
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Indie music meets unpleasant relationship drama. |
| The indie music scene from 1999 meets the road trip dramedy. Band on the Run does try to liven up the tired road trip and the dysfunctional relationships found therein by pairing it with an invite to the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas and a rivalry with another local band, but most of the movie is not the music, most of the movie is the father-son relationship which is uninteresting and not enjoyable to watch. | 2025 Directed by: Jeff Hupp Screenplay by: Jeff Hupp, Colby Clayton Lemaster Starring: Matt Perl, Larry Bagby | |
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A time loop stuck on uninteresting relationship dynamics. |
| Spark sees Aaron (Theo Germaine) hit it off with a complete stranger as part of a bizarre birthday party scavenger hunt, but then after that initial spark, he relives the same day over and over again. Stuck in a time loop, Aaron is determined to figure out why – why Trevor and why himself. Maybe it’s the increasing commonality of the genre, but the characters just keep getting weirder and weirder. | 2024 Directed by: Nicholas Giuricich Screenplay by: Nicholas Giuricich Starring: Theo Germaine, Danell Leyva | |
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A charmless, soulless, meaningless rom-com. |
| Is Things Like This supposed to be about how overweight gay guys can find love too? Or is it about how insufferable assholes can find love? It’s a choice to make your lead character extremely rude to strangers and friends alike and then complain that he’s single because of his appearance. His boyfriend in the opening scene says he’s breaking up with him because he’s not hot enough and then corrects himself that it’s because he’s not hot enough and has a terrible personality. | 2025 Directed by: Max Talisman Screenplay by: Max Talisman Starring: Max Talisman, Joey Pollari | |
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Smart kids dream up stupid plans. |
| A heist movie for middle school kids, or also known as the genre where kids outsmart and out-bully the teachers. A genre that can be a lot of fun when done right, or comes across as painfully stupid when not done right, and F Plus falls on the stupid side way too often. Starting with the title, F+ is not a real grade and yet all the smartest kids in school decided it was. | 2025 Directed by: Kenny Beaumont Screenplay by: Jonathan Davenport Starring: Jennifer Esposito, Wells Rappaport | |
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Tonally-wrong dramedy about boring relationships. |
| Worth the Wait is a multi-relationship dramedy with intertwining stories. All of the main characters are Asian-American with relationship problems. It’s great representation as there are no stereotypes to be found. There are also no interesting characters to be found, and to make it worse, the better actors have awful characters including some typecasting. The film also struggles with juggling between comedy and drama – attempts at silly comedy back-to-back with grief-stricken scenes of tragedy. Relationship dramedies are not supposed to be this hard to watch. | 2025 Directed by: Tom Lin Screenplay by: Maggie Hartmans, Dan Mark, Rachel Tan Starring: Lana Condor, Ross Butler | |
| The star of Hallmark movies is almost always the romance, when a lovely relationship develops between two mature and thoughtful adults. But when the rest of the movie is a soulless, bland, boring, illogical, immoral, and a completely thoughtless adventure in nonsense, it’s impossible to get swept up by the love between a reporter and a hot air balloon pilot. | 2025 Directed by: Larry A. McLean Screenplay by: Lisa Hepner Starring: McKenzie Westmore, Paul Greene | |