Tis the Season:HOT FROSTY, THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER, RED ONE, and CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER'S POINT

How has it been two decades since we’ve collectively added an entry to the Christmas movie canon? By common agreement that last addition has to be 2003’s Elf, which has long since passed into beloved family comedy status. You could also make arguments for its fellow 2003 adult-skewing ensemble rom-com Love Actually and 2004’s motion-capture Polar Express, if only for their perennial appearance in squabbles over their qualities or lack thereof. Since then, though there are small gems of one sort (Kasi Lemmons’ Black Nativity’s blend of musical fantasy and social issues drama) or another (the Kristen Stewart-starring playful closeted-lesbian farce Happiest Season), there’s nothing approaching the New Consensus Favorite. This, despite the past twenty years being a period with more Christmas movies per capita than ever before, thanks to Hallmark Channel’s flood-the-zone approach to made-for-TV holiday fare and streaming services’ attempts to keep up. We get what feels like hundreds of new formulaic Christmas movies every year, and the studios have more or less ceded the territory to the small screen. It’s a genre that’s been oversaturated, and it prevents good—or even memorable—ideas to surface for wide consumption and acceptance.

It says a lot about the state of cheap Christmas movies that the buzziest one of those so far this year is Netflix’s Hot Frosty. It stars Hallmark staple Lacey Chabert as a busy single woman who puts a scarf on a sexy snowman. Unbeknownst to her, it’s a magic scarf, and the snowman comes to life as a flesh-and-blood man (Dustin Milligan). There’s something unnatural and eerie about that whole thing, but an attempt at warmth and cheer follows. The holly jolly Golem proceeds to guilelessly stumble into her life and somehow cause her to fall in love. It’s a little Splash, and a little unhinged, but it’s all so sweetly, smoothly handled that you believe the characters believe it, even if you might never get convinced. It’s perched on the precipice of playing out like a parody of the TV movies it suggests passing resemblance to in its blandly digital sitcom staging. (The director is most recently a Schitt’s Creek veteran.) The supporting cast—Craig Robinson, Joe Lo Truglio, Katy Mixon, Lauren Holly—have certainly been called upon to do arch comic work in the past. But the surprise here is that the movie is resolutely not a parody. It just is an inexpensive unambitious Christmas rom-com. The screenplay by Russell Hainline is earnestly oddball at heart, but in the execution gets its wild premise to run the most routine paces. It picks up some easy, pre-fab would-be heartwarming stuff about small towns and grief and the warmth of the season—even as it doesn’t really have anything to say about that except to have it around like so many multicolored lights and snow machines. It’s not good, exactly, but it sure is what it is. That’s par for the course on the small screen these days, when that’s just one of dozens upon dozens of seasonal time-fillers.

At least the big screen has its fair share of Christmas movies this year, too. Multiplexes are currently screening The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a pretty low-key indie family comedy based on a popular kids’ book from the 70s. It tells the story of preparations for a church Christmas pageant thrown into uncertainty by the town’s troublemakers. A family of poor, neglected children of which everyone assumes the worst show up hoping for free food from the rehearsal snack table, but soon learn the Real Meaning of Christmas. In the process, the so-called Christians involved in judging these poor children reluctantly remember that Jesus asks them to care for such as these. The adaptation is a 70s period piece done on a budget, which means sparse production design and cramped soft-focus establishing shots. It’s not helped by director Dallas Jenkins having no real vision behind the camera, leaving lots of unmotivated camera movement and stilted blocking haphazardly cut together. The thing simply doesn’t flow, and an oddly hollow sound design has a cheap echoing emptiness that does nothing to smooth over the arhythmic editing. It made me appreciate the baseline craft competency of even the most empty-headed homogeneous Hollywood product. Jenkins, best known as creator of the New Testament TV show adaptation The Chosen, clearly has an earnestness, though, and that carries across the movie’s best moments when its obviousness and simplicity strike something sentimental. It’s all a little sweet, if over-determined. But it is so thoroughly undone by its plodding, textureless craft—badly directed down to even the smallest performances, which leaves several cute child actors stranded—that what fleeting moving moments it finds are almost accidental. Not even casting Judy Greer and Pete Holmes as the kind-hearted parents of a family that wants to help the outcasts can lift the overall amateurishness.

And yet, for all that’s awkwardly small and incomplete about that picture, Red One is there to remind us big, galumphing Hollywood competence has its own irritations. Unlike director Jake Kasdan’s better action comedies—the recent Jumanji pictures, which are good crowd-pleasers built with some charm and personality behind the digital noise—this production is an entirely soulless and heartless product from beginning to end. That’s an especially tough sit for a movie ostensibly about Christmas magic. That’s literally the plot, as it follows Santa’s top security elf (Dwayne Johnson) teaming up with a smarmy bounty hunter (Chris Evans) to rescue an abducted Saint Nick (J.K. Simmons) from the clutches of a wintry witch (Kiernan Shipka). She wants to steal his Christmas powers to spread punishments to the bad instead of presents to the good. (Early on, Johnson solemnly informs Santa that this is the first year that more people are on the Naughty List than the Good List. Hmm.) What follows is lots of boring zipping around as we careen from one mirthless action-comedy sequence to the next, before ending in the same endless phony computer-generated fisticuffs in which these things always end up. It’s an enormous production with a fine foundation built entirely out of dependable cliche and then whittled away and sanded down until nothing even that complicated or funny or interesting could possibly survive. It has good makeup effects and bad green screen compositing and shimmering CG backdrops. It cuts together smoothly and always sounds loud. It has a few twinkling sparks of personality from its best actors—Simmons is good on a mall meet-and-greet, and his wife is Bonnie Hunt—and zero from its leads. (Johnson is entirely vacant in a nothing role; Evans is playing his like he’s Ryan Reynolds’ understudy.) And then it swiftly moves to stamp all of the above out, starve them of oxygen, and charge ahead into empty expressions of hollow holiday cheer. It’s a fight to save Christmas, but it can’t even save itself, let alone articulate what the holiday might actually mean.

Leave it to writer-director Tyler Thomas Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point to give us the closest we’ve got to a new great Christmas movie this year. It does so by doing something so simple that it’s really difficult to pull off: it feels like Christmas. This experiential indie is a warm, bustling, amusingly detailed and beautifully busy little picture set almost entirely within one family’s gathering on December 24th. We follow one nuclear family into a cozy house in small town Long Island where a few generations of aunts, uncles, and cousins have squeezed in for food, drink, music, presents, and traditions. Filmed with a grainy warmth by cinematographer Carson Lund, here’s a movie that captures a mood and a place and then lets its eyes and ears wander from room to room and happening to happening. There’s a generosity of spirit and casualness of approach that lets an audience gather an understanding of the characters, their histories, and their interpersonal dynamics through observation and eavesdropping, as if we’re a guest in a stranger’s home trying to figure out how they do things here. It’s a movie that paints in subtleties, attentive to small expressions, fleeting gestures, the unspoken or half said. It gathers up a group picture of this family in this moment, surrounded by a soft-glowing blur of multicolored lights, and with a wall-to-wall wall-of-sound song score (an instant plucking of nostalgia for anyone whose secular Christmas soundtracks are even partially intertwined with Phil Spector, for better or worse). It skips across this holiday night chronologically from sundown to sunup, narrowing to the early-morning experiences of a few youngsters who sneak out to spend hours wandering with other teens underneath flurries fluttering in the glow of street-lamps and strip malls. As we grow aware of various character’s conflicts, foibles, and thwarted ambitions—it’s grandma’s last year in this house, for instance—the movie grows melancholic. It becomes a moving, and quintessentially Christmassy, picture about how tradition and togetherness just barely keeps sadness and loneliness at bay. And that’s what makes it all the more special to find.

Jungle 2 Jungle: JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL

These new Jumanji movies Jake Kasdan (of Walk Hard fame) is doing are big frictionless machines of weightless frivolity. They’re adventure films without stakes. They have character based comedy swanning about in broad burlesque stereotypes. They have violence without danger, eccentricities without personality, sex appeal without sex. They’re basically meaningless, and I can hardly retain details of them. And yet they’re something like fun in the moment, and I think of them only fondly. That they happen to be hugely appealing nothings strikes me as a matter of their throwback appeal to a time where a blockbuster can be premised simply on the hook of a high concept and the promise of Movie Star personas on brightest display. The first one — oh-so-loosely inspired by a slim picture book, and the Robin Williams movie of the same name about a jungle board game come to life — took a bunch of teens and yanked them into a jungle adventure video game they had to win to leave. It took obvious delight in seeing The Rock and Kevin Hart and Jack Black and Karen Gillan playing up insecurities of their inner teen players while expressing bewildered curiosity at their adult avatars’ caricature aspects. The Rock is shocked he’s strong, Hart he’s short, Black he’s fat, Gillan she’s midriff-bared male gaze fantasy, and so on. The Next Level does it one better, in the now old fashioned tradition of a sequel just redoing its predecessor with slight twists here and there. This one adds new characters and scrambles the avatars, so even though we’re once more tromping through moderately clever CG action sequences that vaguely comment on the samey repetitions of video games — rope bridge races! dune buggy chases! mountain fortress sneaking! — the personalities are funny and fresh. Now The Rock is impersonating a cranky grandpa played by Danny DeVito by scrunching his face and shouting, and Hart is a charmingly befuddled Danny Glover by lowering his voice and slowing it to just south of molasses. They’re continual delights, surprising and amusing. (And that Black plays the black teen and somehow never irredeemably crosses a line counts as a small Hollywood miracle.) It’s fun! The action is free of sense, while adhering to strict formula. The body swap silliness and jokey quips come frequently enough to keep the laughs coming and the slapstick, though still oddly underutilized for the premise, works just fine. And then where I found the movie oddly half-moving is in its earnest play with identity, a causal, inclusive, warm-hearted fluidity that makes something charmingly sweet out of The Rock looking with grandfatherly love at Awkwafina and calling her "grandson."

Bad Movie: BAD TEACHER

Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is mean, deceitful, and superficial. She enters each and every social situation with only one goal: getting out with whatever will benefit her the most. She’s also a middle-school teacher, the kind that sleeps behind the desk and shows movies everyday. She is the eponymous Bad Teacher. When she’s not skating by, doing the bare minimum required, she’s romantically pursuing the hot substitute with a rich family (Justin Timberlake) while being pursued by the sweet, kind of dumpy gum teacher (Jason Segel).

This sounds like a high-quality setup for a comedy, especially with this usually charming cast, but it’s just not funny. In Elizabeth Halsey, Cameron Diaz, who can be a great comedienne, gets a part that is certainly a more inherently interesting character than she usually gets to sink her teeth into. The problem is the central miscalculation that we'll care about this character just because she's unrepentantly bad, dressing provocatively, swearing, drinking, doing drugs, behaving recklessly. I don't care that she misbehaves because she goes about it for entirely unremarkable reasons.

First, she wants to get a breast augmentation and decides to save up for it, embezzling and lying her way into more cash. Then, she decides to go after the rich sub. Then, she hears about a bonus for the teacher with the class with the highest test scores, so she wants to become a great teacher long enough to get the cash prize. With all these competing selfish motivations laid out in a flat, unremarkable way it’s hard to get a hold of any one tangible reason to care.

The plot's just a shambles that can't be saved by the actors who are given thin unconvincing characters to play. Supporting characters appear and disappear with oddly inconsequential wispiness despite funny work being done by Phillis Smith, Lucy Punch, John Michael Higgins, Thomas Lennon, and Eric Stonestreet. They drop in and out of the plot with alarming unpredictability. Where do they go when they aren’t showing up to do their required bits? There’s no sense that any of these characters have lives that exist outside the frame.

If the tone weren’t as messy as the plot, I’d be more inclined to cut it some slack. The screenplay by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, of The Office, is neither mean enough nor sweet enough. They want to have their bile and excuse it away too. This is a particularly strange flaw since director Jake Kasdan usually gets the balance right, like in his underrated teen comedy Orange County, underseen showbiz satire The TV Set, or his biopic parody Walk Hard, which manages the difficult feat of mocking while still finding ways to be moving. Bad Teacher just doesn’t work, which is all the more disappointing since it seems to have all the raw materials of a movie that would actually be funny.