Rewrite and translate this title Christmas movies: the best, worst and most mid festive films of 2024 to Japanese between 50 and 60 characters. Do not include any introductory or extra text; return only the title in Japanese.

I’ve spent the last few weeks complaining to anyone who’d listen: “Ugh, I can’t believe I’m being forced to watch all of these stupid Christmas rom-coms! For work!” Little did my friends know that I specifically and enthusiastically volunteered for this task, just as I did last year. The truth is that I love the mind-numbing pleasure and festive good cheer of the Christmas rom-com.

But I keep running into the same problem: how do you assess a genre of cinema where, if we’re being honest, very few of the films are good, but which nonetheless suffers from a dramatic variation in quality? What does it mean if a rom-com about a sexy snowman has a 50 per cent rating on Metacritic? How do you discern whether you’ll enjoy something by the standards of a Christmas rom-com, whether a film will be bad in a fun way or simply bad?

The critic Roger Ebert once explained that his star-rating system was entirely relative: if you’re reviewing a superhero film, you’re comparing it not to Citizen Kane but to the best examples of the superhero genre. As Ebert’s heir apparent, and the most influential and celebrated film critic of my own age, this is the methodology I’m going to apply here. I’m judging these films on whether they succeed on their own terms, the strength of their Christmas cheer, how enjoyable they’d be to laugh at with some friends and a glass or two of mulled cider. Whether or not they’re good compared to The Brutalist is neither here nor there, and there will be no points docked for unoriginality, implausibility or saccharine schmaltz. 

HOT FROSTY🎄🎄🎄

Hot Frosty has an unusually fantastical high-concept premise for a Christmas rom-com, a genre which usually strives more for an idealised version of the mundane: we can all relate to being a newly single, stressed-out businesswoman living a life of desperate loneliness in the big city (right…?), but very few of us will have placed an enchanted scarf on a snowman, only for to discover it has transformed into a man with a six-pack. But instead of alienating viewers with its outlandish conceit, Hot Frosty seems to have melted many a heart: it holds a 81 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the consensus on social media seems to be that it falls somewhere between “so bad it’s good” and genuinely entertaining.

My review of Hot Frosty boils down to this: it’s hard to imagine someone choosing to watch it, knowing what it’s about, and coming away disappointed. Mean Girls alumni Lacey Chabert is genuinely endearing in the lead role, which goes a long way in a film like this. My biggest critique is the snowman himself: if you’re selling me a film on the basis of a “sexy snowman”, he had better be sexy – and while Dustin Mulligan is clearly a good-looking guy, the character is simply too annoying to be a convincing romantic lead. The fact that he effectively has the mind of a young child, just like Emma Stone in Poor Things, also raises some thorny questions about sexual ethics: the snowman, who has only been alive for a couple of days and doesn’t understand the most basic facts about life, truly consent to a romantic relationship? What kind of love is really possible under such a troubling power dynamic?

THE MERRY GENTLEMAN 🎄

The only criteria I care about when it comes to these films is whether or not they fill me with Christmas cheer and, sadly, The Merry Gentleman had the opposite effect: I came away feeling flat and bereft, wondering whether Christmas really has become disenchanted and desacralised, emptied of all meaning, magic and wonder.

It basically has the same opening as The Substance: Britt Robertson gets fired from her job as a dancer in a Christmas revue show in New York, which is apparently a prestigious and year-round career, because she is too old, which leads her to spend Christmas in her hometown for the first time in years. Her parents’ live music venue is about to go out of business, so she teams up with local handyman Chad Michael Murray to stage a PG-rated male striptease show, in the hope of raising $30,000 before Christmas Eve.

The biggest problem with The Merry Gentleman is that the leads have zero chemistry or charisma, and communicate only through banal, sarcastic quips that honestly sound like they could have been written by ChatGPT. Next down the line is the fact that it looks like shit: I wasn’t expecting a sumptuous, Todd Haynes-style production but the milieu they inhabit is so bleak, desolate and cheap-looking that it made me feel kind of sad, in the same way that watching Eastern European pornography might. The revue is supposed to be a wild success but I guess they didn’t have the budget for extras because the audience only ever consists of like 20 people.

The Merry Gentleman also suffers from a total absence of conflict or narrative tension. That Christmas rom-coms are light, easy and frictionless is what a lot of people like about them – no-one is demanding Tennessee Williams – but there has to be something. It takes about five seconds for Chad Michael Murray to go from “if you think I’ll ever take part in your saucy Christmas review, you’ve lost your damn mind!!!” to “OK, sure.” Bar a brief segment at the end where it seems like Robertson is going to go back to New York, everything runs smoothly from beginning to end and as a result it is very boring to watch – too boring, ultimately, to be enjoyable even as a hate-watch.

MEET ME NEXT CHRISTMAS 🎄🎄🎄

This is the film I was most most apprehensive about watching, because the plot revolves around a concert by a capella vocal group Pentatonix and I find that genre of music so grating that it’s almost physically uncomfortable to listen to. But I was pleasantly surprised. As with Hot Frosty, its saving grace is the lead performance: Christina Milain is charming, endearing and easy to root for, and she has good chemistry with Devale Ellis, who is also very likeable. In a film like this, that’s really all you need – everything else is forgivable. It’s also a much slicker production than either Merry Gentleman or Hot Frosty, and it looks more or less like a real film (in the context of the Christmas rom-com genre, this is high praise).

But while there wasn’t as much Pentatonix in the film as I had feared (they mostly feature as a kind of Greek chorus who, through an implausible set of circumstances, comment on the action as it plays out), there was still way too much for my tastes, and the climactic concert scene was hard to get through. Hopefully next year the producers will make a sequel centred around a more credible artist – how about two gay guys trying to get tickets for a Caroline Palochek gig?

OUR LITTLE SECRET 🎄🎄🎄

I enjoyed this film, unironically and without caveats. It’s about Lindsay Lohan visiting her boyfriend’s family home for Christmas and discovering that her childhood sweetheart and ex-boyfriend (Ian Harding) is also a guest, because he’s dating her boyfriend’s sister. Hoping to avoid an awkward situation, they decide to pretend they don’t know each other and a series of comic hi-jinx ensue.

To return to my theory about the role of conflict in the Christmas rom-com (which is the subject of my doctoral thesis at Harvard University), what I liked most about Our Little Secret is it has a proper villain: the battle-axe prospective mother-in-law played by Kristen Chinoweth, who gives a very funny performance. She comes around at the end, of course, but for most of the runtime she really is monstrously obnoxious, which is a nice corrective to how insipid the genre can be – it’s boring when everyone is unfailingly kind-hearted and sweet.

I’ve spent the last few weeks complaining to anyone who’d listen: “Ugh, I can’t believe I’m being forced to watch all of these stupid Christmas rom-coms! For work!” Little did my friends know that I specifically and enthusiastically volunteered for this task, just as I did last year. The truth is that I love the mind-numbing pleasure and festive good cheer of the Christmas rom-com.

But I keep running into the same problem: how do you assess a genre of cinema where, if we’re being honest, very few of the films are good, but which nonetheless suffers from a dramatic variation in quality? What does it mean if a rom-com about a sexy snowman has a 50 per cent rating on Metacritic? How do you discern whether you’ll enjoy something by the standards of a Christmas rom-com, whether a film will be bad in a fun way or simply bad?

The critic Roger Ebert once explained that his star-rating system was entirely relative: if you’re reviewing a superhero film, you’re comparing it not to Citizen Kane but to the best examples of the superhero genre. As Ebert’s heir apparent, and the most influential and celebrated film critic of my own age, this is the methodology I’m going to apply here. I’m judging these films on whether they succeed on their own terms, the strength of their Christmas cheer, how enjoyable they’d be to laugh at with some friends and a glass or two of mulled cider. Whether or not they’re good compared to The Brutalist is neither here nor there, and there will be no points docked for unoriginality, implausibility or saccharine schmaltz. 

HOT FROSTY🎄🎄🎄

Hot Frosty has an unusually fantastical high-concept premise for a Christmas rom-com, a genre which usually strives more for an idealised version of the mundane: we can all relate to being a newly single, stressed-out businesswoman living a life of desperate loneliness in the big city (right…?), but very few of us will have placed an enchanted scarf on a snowman, only for to discover it has transformed into a man with a six-pack. But instead of alienating viewers with its outlandish conceit, Hot Frosty seems to have melted many a heart: it holds a 81 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the consensus on social media seems to be that it falls somewhere between “so bad it’s good” and genuinely entertaining.

My review of Hot Frosty boils down to this: it’s hard to imagine someone choosing to watch it, knowing what it’s about, and coming away disappointed. Mean Girls alumni Lacey Chabert is genuinely endearing in the lead role, which goes a long way in a film like this. My biggest critique is the snowman himself: if you’re selling me a film on the basis of a “sexy snowman”, he had better be sexy – and while Dustin Mulligan is clearly a good-looking guy, the character is simply too annoying to be a convincing romantic lead. The fact that he effectively has the mind of a young child, just like Emma Stone in Poor Things, also raises some thorny questions about sexual ethics: the snowman, who has only been alive for a couple of days and doesn’t understand the most basic facts about life, truly consent to a romantic relationship? What kind of love is really possible under such a troubling power dynamic?

THE MERRY GENTLEMAN 🎄

The only criteria I care about when it comes to these films is whether or not they fill me with Christmas cheer and, sadly, The Merry Gentleman had the opposite effect: I came away feeling flat and bereft, wondering whether Christmas really has become disenchanted and desacralised, emptied of all meaning, magic and wonder.

It basically has the same opening as The Substance: Britt Robertson gets fired from her job as a dancer in a Christmas revue show in New York, which is apparently a prestigious and year-round career, because she is too old, which leads her to spend Christmas in her hometown for the first time in years. Her parents’ live music venue is about to go out of business, so she teams up with local handyman Chad Michael Murray to stage a PG-rated male striptease show, in the hope of raising $30,000 before Christmas Eve.

The biggest problem with The Merry Gentleman is that the leads have zero chemistry or charisma, and communicate only through banal, sarcastic quips that honestly sound like they could have been written by ChatGPT. Next down the line is the fact that it looks like shit: I wasn’t expecting a sumptuous, Todd Haynes-style production but the milieu they inhabit is so bleak, desolate and cheap-looking that it made me feel kind of sad, in the same way that watching Eastern European pornography might. The revue is supposed to be a wild success but I guess they didn’t have the budget for extras because the audience only ever consists of like 20 people.

The Merry Gentleman also suffers from a total absence of conflict or narrative tension. That Christmas rom-coms are light, easy and frictionless is what a lot of people like about them – no-one is demanding Tennessee Williams – but there has to be something. It takes about five seconds for Chad Michael Murray to go from “if you think I’ll ever take part in your saucy Christmas review, you’ve lost your damn mind!!!” to “OK, sure.” Bar a brief segment at the end where it seems like Robertson is going to go back to New York, everything runs smoothly from beginning to end and as a result it is very boring to watch – too boring, ultimately, to be enjoyable even as a hate-watch.

MEET ME NEXT CHRISTMAS 🎄🎄🎄

This is the film I was most most apprehensive about watching, because the plot revolves around a concert by a capella vocal group Pentatonix and I find that genre of music so grating that it’s almost physically uncomfortable to listen to. But I was pleasantly surprised. As with Hot Frosty, its saving grace is the lead performance: Christina Milain is charming, endearing and easy to root for, and she has good chemistry with Devale Ellis, who is also very likeable. In a film like this, that’s really all you need – everything else is forgivable. It’s also a much slicker production than either Merry Gentleman or Hot Frosty, and it looks more or less like a real film (in the context of the Christmas rom-com genre, this is high praise).

But while there wasn’t as much Pentatonix in the film as I had feared (they mostly feature as a kind of Greek chorus who, through an implausible set of circumstances, comment on the action as it plays out), there was still way too much for my tastes, and the climactic concert scene was hard to get through. Hopefully next year the producers will make a sequel centred around a more credible artist – how about two gay guys trying to get tickets for a Caroline Palochek gig?

OUR LITTLE SECRET 🎄🎄🎄

I enjoyed this film, unironically and without caveats. It’s about Lindsay Lohan visiting her boyfriend’s family home for Christmas and discovering that her childhood sweetheart and ex-boyfriend (Ian Harding) is also a guest, because he’s dating her boyfriend’s sister. Hoping to avoid an awkward situation, they decide to pretend they don’t know each other and a series of comic hi-jinx ensue.

To return to my theory about the role of conflict in the Christmas rom-com (which is the subject of my doctoral thesis at Harvard University), what I liked most about Our Little Secret is it has a proper villain: the battle-axe prospective mother-in-law played by Kristen Chinoweth, who gives a very funny performance. She comes around at the end, of course, but for most of the runtime she really is monstrously obnoxious, which is a nice corrective to how insipid the genre can be – it’s boring when everyone is unfailingly kind-hearted and sweet.