30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

That makes This Christmas a very busy holiday comedy, where plot points circle and land on an overcrowded schedule. Once I saw what was happening, I started to enjoy it. Preston A. Whitmore II, the writer and director, must have sat up for long hours into the night in front of hundreds of three-by-five-inch index cards tacked to a corkboard to keep all this straight.

Ma’Dere has, let’s see—a son who is secretly married to a white woman (whoops, forgot to mention the Whitfields are African-American), a daughter who thinks she’s better than everyone else, a daughter who thinks she’s in love but may be mistaken, a daughter whose husband fools around on her, a son who owes big-time money to a couple of guys who yearn to break his legs, and a youngest son named “Baby” who is afraid to tell her about his deepest dream.

Ma’Dere is played by the irreplaceable Loretta Devine (Grey’s Anatomy, Dreamgirls, Down in the Delta). In order, the children I listed are played by Columbus Short, Sharon Leal, Lauren London, Regina King, Idris Elba, and Chris Brown. A strong cast, and we do begin to feel a sense of family, because for all their problems, they love one another and accept weaknesses they cannot ignore. They all talk so much, though, that they should get extra credit for having any secrets at all. You tell one person something in this family, and you might as well announce it on Oprah.

Every single cast member, and a few I didn’t mention, such as wives, boyfriends, and hoodlums, has a couple of big scenes as problems are revealed, reach crisis proportions, and are healed in one way or another. There is also a lot of eating going on, which is necessary at Christmastime, although this isn’t a movie like Soul Food where everyone is a champion cook.

But what I think audiences will enjoy most is the music. Baby Whitfield’s big secret from his mother is—don’t tell anyone—he wants to be a singer. She already has one musician son, the one being chased by gamblers, and wants her youngest to do something more respectable. Baby is played by Chris Brown, a hip-hop artist who can actually sing a traditional song in a classic and beautiful style, as he proves on the occasion when his mother finds out his big secret. At a church, gospel artist DeNetria Champ has another showstopper. And the sound track is alive.

This is a movie about African-Americans, but it’s not “an African-American movie.” It’s an American movie, about a rambunctious family that has no more problems than any other family but simply happens to discover and grapple with them in about forty-eight hours. What’s surprising is how well Whitmore, the director, manages to direct traffic. He’s got one crisis cooling, another problem exploding, a third dilemma gathering steam, and people exchanging significant looks about secrets still not introduced. It’s sort of a screwball comedy effect, but with a heart.

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas ½

PG, 76 m., 1993

Chris Sarandon (Jack Skellington), Catherine O’Hara (Sally), Glenn Shadix (Mayor), Paul Reubens (Lock), William Hickey (Evil Scientist). Directed By Henry Selick. Produced By Tim Burton. Screenplay by Caroline Thompson and Michael McDowell.

The movies can create entirely new worlds for us, but that is one of their rarest gifts. More often, directors go for realism, for worlds we can recognize. One of the many pleasures of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is that there is not a single recognizable landscape within it. Everything looks strange and haunting. Even Santa Claus would be difficult to recognize without his red-and-white uniform.

The movie, which tells the story of an attempt by Halloween to annex Christmas, is shot in a process called stop-action animation.

In an ordinary animated film, the characters are drawn. Here they are constructed, and then moved a little, frame by frame, so that they appear to live. This allows a three-dimensional world to be presented, instead of the flatter universe of cel animation. And it is a godsend for the animators of Nightmare, who seem to have built their world from scratch—every house, every stick and stone—before sending their skeletal and rather pathetic little characters in to inhabit it.

The movie begins with the information that each holiday has its own town. Halloweentown, for example, is in charge of all the preparations for Halloween, and its most prominent citizen is a bony skeleton named Jack Skellington, whose moves and wardrobe seem influenced by Fred Astaire.

One day Jack stumbles into the wrong entryway in Halloweentown, and finds himself smack dab in the middle of preparations for Christmas. Now this, he realizes, is more like it! Instead of ghosts and goblins and pumpkins, there are jolly little helpers assisting Santa in his annual duty of bringing peace on earth and goodwill to men.