You’ve got to do a bit of poking around to find the best Christmas movies of 2023. In the pre-streaming era it was just down to what was on telly and available in the local Blockbuster. Bonus if you could afford Sky. Now, of course, we’ve got the biggest entertainment companies in the world competing for the tinsel pound. Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and more are gift-wrapping their biggest stars and blandest plots for your yuletide streaming pleasure. But, good grief, you’ve got to feel a lot of presents before you find one that’s not an itchy jumper or a pair of socks.
Ranking the best Christmas movies to stream 2023
Best. Christmas. Ever! – Netflix
Netflix is comfortably the worst offender. Best. Christmas. Ever!, possibly the least appropriately named Christmas movie ever, has Heather Graham trying to find the chinks in the perfect life of an old friend played by ’90s R&B superstar Brandy (who’s doing the double with a Christmas album and movie this year). It’s awful. Revolting, sentimental, not at all funny. Early hints of secrets and Stepford wife perfection mean you keep expecting it to turn into a horror – but when the twists come they all head to the Hallmark Channel. Weirdly uncharming and completely unsatisfying.
Christmas movie rating: 0/5
Family Switch – Netflix
Better and yet, simultaneously, somehow, worse is body swap comedy Family Switch which gains points for Jennifer Garner and Emma Myers’ on-screen likeability as a supernaturally switched mother and daughter, but loses them for having absolutely no Christmas DNA whatsoever. Someone bolted Christmas on, and it’s hanging there, awkwardly, like a weird, out-of-place bauble. At least Best. Christmas. Ever! puts the season at the centre.
Christmas movie rating: 2/5
Candy Cane Lane – Prime Video
Equally weird is Candy Cane Lane, in which Christmas-mad Eddie Murphy literally sells his soul to a disgruntled elf to win a decorating competition, and is cursed with the animals from The 12 Days of Christmas like they’re the plagues of Egypt. Again, it sounds like a horror film, and maybe it would be better if it was. It works when it leans into its weird (Jillian Bell’s sadistic elf, Pepper, snacking on a bauble like an apple, Nick Offerman as a tiny Victorian china doll. No, really), though less so when it goes broad. It’s fine.
Christmas movie rating: 3/5
Genie – Now / Sky Cinema
Playing it way safer is Genie, Richard Curtis’s update of his 1991 TV movie Bernard & The Genie, which replaces Lenny Henry with Melissa McCarthy and Alan Cumming with Paapa Essiedu (though Cumming gets to play a hissable baddie, which he does with obvious aplomb) and transplants the action to a picture-perfect New York City. McCarthy and Essiedu are charm personified, and there are some lovely jokes, though a huge lack of depth. Curtis has done Christmas way better.
Christmas movie rating: 3/5
Your Christmas or Mine 2 – Prime Video
More fun is Your Christmas or Mine 2, the sequel to last year’s double-fish-out-of-water Christmas romcom. This time Asa Butterfield’s buttoned-up poshos and Cora Kirk’s common-as-muck-and-reet-proud-of-it Macclesfieldians go skiing — There are predictable mix-ups and mishaps a-plenty, but it’s genuinely funny and smacks you nicely in the warm and fuzzies. Plus, guest star Jane Krakowski is, as ever, a hoot. Kirk deserves to be huge.
Christmas movie rating: 4/5