This Time Each Year | 2024 Christmas Movies

What do you do when you are Hallmark and you want to have a movie about a very serious subject but you can’t really say the name of the serious subject? Call it This Time Each Year and throw it on the Hallmark Mystery channel. It’s a mystery if you don’t actually say the word, right?

Lauren (Alison Sweeney) and Kevin (Niall Matter) are having marriage troubles. They have been separated for a year but Lauren still hasn’t told her mother. When her mother comes to visit, Lauren asks Kevin to pretend nothing has happened. Will this bring them together or break them farther apart?

This is a movie about alcoholism that doesn’t want to actually be about alcoholism. Kevin was successfully working as a bartender and not drinking when his boss randomly fires him because he doesn’t want to tempt Kevin with holiday parties? Kevin walks everywhere (even though we don’t see that) because he lost his license the year prior, though they don’t ever say how or why he lost his license. (If it was drunk driving, you rarely lose your license in the US after only one instance.) This Time doesn’t want to make Kevin out to be a bad guy. He has to get back with Lauren, after all. But it really is disingenuous to only give him vague alcoholic stereotypes that don’t seem to have any actual consequence.

If you overlook this giant shadow hanging over the movie, it’s still pretty boring. Lauren spends the entire movie feeling bad for herself. One of the big problems they have is a house the couple bought before they split. It’s a gorgeous house that they claim is a money pit but, again, they only give vague things that needed to be fixed in the house. When we actually see various parts of the house, there isn’t anything that seems wrong. I know that you can’t always see the bad parts of a house but they literally named things like “the staircase” and “the roof” but neither needed work. Anyway, Lauren blames herself for buying the house and putting their family in financial strain and it is just so lame. Neither of these people are interesting and the movie neuters the parts it wants to make interesting.

Rating: Just sell the house already

Love & Jane (2024)

These Jane Austen-inspired movies are going to make me hate Hallmark. Just when the Christmas movies were getting better. It’s time for Love & Jane.

Lilly (Alison Sweeney) is obsessed with Jane Austen novels. When her life begins to go awry, she wishes she could ask the author for advice. That night, the ghost of Jane Austen (Kendra Anderson) appears to help Lilly through her difficult times.

Yes, this is as dumb as it sounds. Lilly, a rather self-centered woman, doesn’t like technology and thinks everything was better in Jane’s time. Of course, she works for a marketing company and uses a movie version of Siri or Alexa. But technology, bad. And, from what we see, her entire life revolves around Jane Austen. It’s pretty annoying and I have no idea why anyone puts up with her.

I’d talk about the guys in the movie but they are barely there. Lilly breaks up with her boyfriend, Martin (Matthew Kevin Anderson), is the beginning of the movie because he gets a job in Chicago. (Even though he noted that she could move there if she wanted…) But the big romantic interest is Trevor (Benjamin Ayres), who is a client of her firm. He basically pops in now and again to remind us that he exists even though he has no real effect on the plot. This movie really is a romance movie between Lilly and Jane.

There are a few more movies coming up in the Loveuary catalog. I hope that they are better than this.

Rating: D

A Magical Christmas Village | 2022 Christmas Movies

Hallmark usually puts their magical item movies over on their Movies & Mysteries channel. A Magical Christmas Village managed to make it to the main channel! That must mean it’s not very magical, right?

Summer (Alison Sweeney) is working on rebuilding an old building in town while raising her daughter Chloe (Maesa Nicholson). When her mother, Vivian (Marlo Thomas), has to move in, Summer’s perfect world is rocked. Vivian sets up a miniature Christmas replica of the town and tells Chloe that any wish she makes will come true. As Chloe creates scenarios with the mini villagers, wonderous things begin to happen.

It’s funny that the movie is named after the Christmas village set but the set isn’t highly featured. Yes, we get scenes of Chloe setting it up and playing with the characters. Those scenes are fairly far apart though. Granted, we still understand that Summer and Ryan’s (Luke Macfarlane) budding romance is only happening thanks to Chloe. But maybe we could have had a little more of the village appear.

Both Sweeney and Macfarlane are decent actors and Marlo Thomas is classic television royalty. So the movie is not lacking in the talent department. However, it is a basic by-the-book Christmas romance movie. The Christmas village twist does make it slightly more interesting. But I think the most interesting part of the movie is Vivian’s character. Her hippy ways seem way more magical than the village. It might have been cooler if all of the magic was Vivian’s. Like she was the one making her granddaughter’s wishes come true.

A Magical Christmas Village is actually a pretty good movie. It’s not the most interesting that we’ve seen so far but it’s not terrible. I think this is the first movie where we’ve had the two romantic leads actually have something real in common instead of only living on the same street or in the same town. This was one of the few couples I was rooting for. Thankfully, it’s a Hallmark movie so I knew they were going to get together in the end.

Open By Christmas | 2021 Christmas Movies

Sometimes I don’t understand how Hallmark picks which movies to go on which channel. You would think that movies with a “mystery” type of plot would go on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. But they don’t. Open By Christmas is an example of that.

When Nicky (Alison Sweeney) comes home for Thanksgiving, her parents tell her that they are selling her childhood home to move into a smaller house. As Nicky helps them pack, she finds an old unopened Christmas card in one of her high school textbooks. The card professes love for Nicky but it doesn’t have a signature. It’s up to Nicky and her best friend, Simone (Erica Durance), to figure out who slipped the card into the book so long ago.

This really could have been a good Christmas mystery movie. But instead of spending the majority of the movie trying to sleuth out who wrote the card, they spend more time focused on Simone’s fiancé, Jeremy (Michael Karl Richards), surprising Simone with a new house. They spend so much time on it that you would think that Simone is the main character in the movie. (And, seriously, who surprises someone by buying them a house? Don’t do that. It’s financially awful.)

As for the mystery itself? We only get a few hints as to who the writer could be. Thanks to the message in the card, Nicky and Simone surmise that the writer was on the basketball team. Nicky’s mom did some online searching and figured out that the person that wrote it is left-handed. Finally, Simone’s future mother-in-law actually recognizes the handwriting! But it doesn’t actually lead to the correct answer. It would have been nice if there was some more detective work shown. After all, it’s supposed to be the main plot of the movie!

Alas, the movie promises a lot but delivers little. This is yet another movie that is fine as background noise but if you actually pay attention, it’s lacking in substance. I know that Hallmark churns out a lot of movies. It would be nice if they could hire some good writers for once.

Good Morning Christmas! | 2020 Christmas Movies

I almost kinda think this movie may have been based on reality. Or at least some sort of tabloid rumor. It just gives me that wink-wink-nudge-nudge type of vibe.

Brian Bright (Marc Blucas) and Melissa Merry (Alison Sweeney) co-host a morning (?) television show. Since they don’t get along off-camera, Bright decides to quit the show. The duo must spend Christmas week in the town of Mistletoe before airing the big announcement about Bright’s departure.

What corporate schlub named their television show “Today with Bright & Merry” instead of something like “Have a Merry & Bright Day”? Doesn’t everyone know that ‘merry and bright’ is the phrase and not ‘bright and merry’? It sounds dumb the wrong way. Also, this movie is named Good Morning Christmas! but at no point does this seem like a morning show. Morning show people do not go out at night because they have to be on-set at like 4AM. And it’s super bright outside when they are filming. And their entire show seems to be one small segment where they talk about what they are going to do. At no point are they on TV showing off the town’s festivities, even though we can clearly see cameramen around filming caroling and whatnot.

Beyond the obvious fakeness of their show, Blucas and Sweeney aren’t terrible actors. They have both been on popular TV shows, even if they weren’t favorite characters. Blucas was Riley on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sweeney plays Sami Brady on Days of Our Lives. They don’t have a ton of chemistry together but I suppose they aren’t completely unbelievable as a couple. I could see them as the ‘formerly hated but now love each other’ type of couple. The relationship just wouldn’t move quite as fast as it does in the movie. (But that is true for all of these movie relationships…)

With all of that in mind, go ahead and watch Good Morning Christmas! It doesn’t stand out among the other Christmas movies but it’s also not completely boring. A perfect example of a ‘just fine’ movie.