ChristmasMovieReviews Reviews

The Princess Switch (2018)

The Great Ruritanian Bake Off?

[6/10 · 29 December 2020]

In the 2018 final of The Great British Bake Off, insecure but brilliant nuclear scientist Rahul's stand mixer cracked and shattered, sending shards of glass across his work station and through all of his carefully prepared ingredients. He had to start everything again from scratch and incredibly still had the technical baking excellence and imagination to emerge victorious as that season's champion. Why is this at all relevant to The Princess Switch, a lightweight festive romance movie? Well, because that warm and cosy real-life baking show managed to conjure up a finale with far greater drama than the end of this scripted fantasy, which dropped on Netflix at around the same time.

Like the Bake Off finale, The Princess Switch also concludes with a mixer emergency at a high profile baking competition (in this case heroine Stacy's mixer has had its power cord cut by her mean spirited rival). Unlike in the real world, however, this doesn't seem to be much of a stressful crisis. The movie sets this up like it's going to be a big thing, that winning the baking contest is a big deal for Stacy, that her rival is a major antagonist, and that this sabotage might ruin her chances. But then she just like: "I guess we'll just have to make the decorations by hand" and there's a cut to the finished cake and she's done just that with minimal fuss. There's no drama at all, no sense of peril or possibility that she might not finish or even not win. The rival doesn't even seem especially angry to come second. Hell, there's barely any actual on screen baking, just people in aprons and finished cakes.

Yes, watching this movie about a baker travelling to another country for a prestigious baking competition only to feature barely any actual baking (at one point she suggests baking Christmas cookies to her love interest and, instead of a standard festive movie baking montage, she just shows up later with some cookies) did make me feel like Milhouse watching Itchy and Scratchy demanding "when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?" But, really, this is more just a small example of a wider issue with a movie that doesn't massively care about stakes or drama. I mean, the story has a foreigner essentially infiltrating the royal court and impersonating the country's future queen and nobody (including her soon-to-be husband) seem massively bothered by it!

The baking contest is, of course, merely a pretext for the movie to get Chicago native Stacy over to Netflix's latest Ruritania in order for the real story to begin. Following A Christmas Prince's Aldovia, we now find ourselves in Belgravia, the most English-seeming central European country imaginable, where every place (including the nation itself) is named after parts of London.

The model mostly cited for The Princess Switch's central plot (in which Stacy swaps places with her royal doppelganger Duchess Margaret) is Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. In truth, though, this has more in common with the original "Ruritanian romance" The Prisoner of Zenda, only, you know, without any of the swashbuckling adventure or hissable villains or sense of peril.

Like Zenda, The Princess Switch actually has an explanation for the identical royal and commoner, stemming from a scandalous liaison involving a shared ancestor several generations earlier. Like Zenda, it takes advantage of the fact that an engaged royal couple wouldn't actually have got to know each other before the official engagement, meaning that the fiancé doesn't notice the switch and the double can be the one to first charm them. Like Zenda, its romantic dilemma is ultimately one between love and royal duty. And, like Zenda, it is slyly, even quite probably unwittingly, republican, in showing that an ordinary person makes a better royal than someone born to do it. Why don't we just find a superior lookalike to sub in for all royalty?

A movie that's a mash-up of a Great British Bake Off finale and The Prisoner of Zenda sounds utterly delicious and, even though The Princess Switch never really rises to that promise, it is a presentably sweet, light confection, albeit one that's mostly empty calories. Netflix's favourite festive additive, Vanessa Hudgens, does a fair job in the double role and her Disney past leaves no doubt that this is a movie very much for those teens and adults who never truly outgrew their princess fairytale phase. The Princess Switch doesn't leave you particularly hungry for seconds (although there is a sequel), but it's a satisfying enough dish on its own. It just had the ingredients to be something better.

A Very British Christmas (2019 TV Movie)

Great tourist advert, mediocre romance

[5/10 · 21 December 2020]

There are two Yorkshires that exist side-by-side in the popular imagination. There's the Yorkshire of big, sprawling industrial cities, giant mills with chimney stacks spewing smoke, coal mines and slag heaps, now all closed down or in decline. A place of wounded machismo seen on screen in everything from This Sporting Life to The Full Monty. And then there's an equally exaggerated and mythic Yorkshire of moors and dales, dry stone walls, quaint little cottages and small towns where humble Northern wit and wisdom is served at tea rooms and pubs.

It is very much the latter version where we find ourselves for A Very Yorkshire Christmas (also known by the broader title A Very British Christmas, for people who don't already have an established set of stereotypes for rural Yorkshire), a film in which the promise of opening a new mine in a West Riding town is seen as a terrible threat to its quaint prettiness, not a lifeline for some of the hundreds of thousands put out of work through generations of pit closures.

As if we were in any doubt that the particular her heightened version of Yorkshire we're in here is that of James Herriot's Yorkshire Vet books, here's Rachel Shenton from the latest TV adaptation of Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small as our heroine. In this case, though, the British actress plays a big time American opera singer (accent: passable, but a bit wobbly) stuck in the small Yorkshire town after her flight was diverted. It's also clear from the moment that the connection from an international airport is via a historic steam locomotive that we are very much in festive fantasy land as well.

While filmed on location, a largely Yorkshire production from a local team, the movie feels like it wasn't really made with a local audience in mind. In fact, it gives the impression of a British product made for export, particularly to the American market. As such, the movie's plot and characters conform closely to the formulas of the Hallmark holiday romances with which it hopes to compete. So, Jessica is the big city career girl stuck in a small town, falling for a rustic widower with a cute moppet, along with the friendliness and slow pace of life off the beaten track. It's just that said rugged chap struggling to move on from his late wife is from Yorkshire rather than a small town in the American Midwest.

In truth there isn't amazing chemistry between Jessica and local holiday cottage owner Andrew (Mark Killeen. Accent: resolutely Southern). But, if Andrew charming Jessica is not wholly convincing, the movie does a better job of selling the genre's other key relationship: Jessica being equally charmed by the small town.

Here's where there is a genuine advantage to the movie having a different setting to the average Hallmark movie Christmasville. Unusually, rather than just creating a Yorkshire version of those imagined quaint Christmas-obssessed towns where these stories tend to take place, A Very Yorkshire Christmas showcases a real town.

Knaresborough may not be quite so much the middle of nowhere as the film implies - it's actually barely outside Leeds, one of those huge Yorkshire cities built by the Industrial Revolution - but otherwise the film makes a pretty accurate case for it as a picturesque town worth visiting. Mostly filmed on location in the real Knaresborough, the film shows off the medieval castle, the Victorian viaduct and rowing boats on the River Nidd in scenes where the town seduces the heroine far more convincingly than the male love interest.

OK, so it was obviously filmed in spring and has a clunky line about how it never snows at Christmas in Yorkshire (not true) to explain the unseasonal sunshine. (Don't worry, snow fans, there's a flurry of unconvincing CGI white stuff in the finale). But, beyond all the deceptive movie magic and festive fantasy, the film shows enough of the real Knaresborough (a genuinely pretty little town) that there will definitely be people watching and thinking about booking a visit.

As a festive romance, then, A Very Yorkshire Christmas is run of the mill at best. If it was conceived as an advert for the local tourist board, though, fair play, it's a bit of a triumph!

Broadcasting Christmas (2016 TV Movie)

Which 90s TV icon will win a new screen role?

[6/10 · 20 December 2020]

There's a few things that a festive romance movie really loves above all else. A baking montage where flirtatiously tossing flour and sugar around matters more than ever seeing the end product. A passionate kiss in front of twinkling Christmas lights and falling snow as the camera spins around the couple. Cheap cover versions of public domain holiday songs. Above any of those trends, though, one thing sits like a star atop the TV movie Christmas tree: faded 1990s TV icons who never quite made it in real movies. And in Broadcasting Christmas our tree is adorned with not one but two such festive stars as 90s Superman Dean Cain romances 90s Sabrina Melissa Joan Hart.

Neither actor has incredible dramatic range and, two decades after the height of their fame, their late-twentieth-century pin-up good looks are a little woolly around the edges. But what both bring (aside from audience affection from the roles that made them famous) is a kind of polished professional charm and facility with mild light comedy shenanigans that makes them perfectly paired with both this sort of material and each other.

Both Cain and Hart's biggest theatrical box office success in recent times has been courtesy of the dreadful God's Not Dead franchise (a series so hamfistedly awful that it's genuinely hard to say whether it's more offensive to the atheists it mocks or the Christians it claims to represent). Fortunately there are no big theological issues that the movie is ill equipped to tackle here. In fact, what we have is a setup that plays far more to the leads' strengths in slick presentation of lightweight fluff. That's because it's a story all about two old flames competing for a job presenting a breakfast TV magazine show. Slick festive fluff about making slick festive fluff, in other words.

As is practically the law for such movies, one of the potential couple is from a small town, the other the big city. In this case, Hart is a reporter for a local TV station back in Connecticut, having lost out on a New York news anchor job to her then-boyfriend (Cain) years earlier. Fortunately, a "mad as hell and not going to take it any more", Network-style, on-air rant somehow puts her in the running for the coveted morning show gig when it blows up on social media. (This movie is obsessed with mentioning "social media" in generic terms every five minutes, as if desperate to remind everyone that this is happening in the present day, despite its evergreen concept).

Cain, whose years as Clark Kent provide him at the very least with a grounding in playing "guy whose love interest is a better journalist than him", has the more interesting arc of the two. And in fact that is kind of related to how the movie makes it clear that Hart's character is better at what they do. You see, Cain's reporter is the son of a bigshot news anchor and has a few issues over living up to daddy's legacy. It also turns out that his father pulled some strings to land him the New York job all those years ago, even though Hart's character was the first choice candidate.

Given Cain's notoriously unpleasant politics in real life, it's kind of interesting to see him playing a character realising that he hasn't got where he is on merit but through nepotism. Whatever Cain believes in reality, his performance as a man coming to terms with living in a world where privilege trumps being the best candidate for a job is pretty good. He convinces that he genuinely wants to make amends for his unconscious benefitting from an accident of birth. There's also something potentially interesting in how the character rejects the world of serious news reporting by realising his skill set is better suited for the more "feminine", "frivolous" world of morning show segments. That's also a nice contrast to the real Cain's insistence on rigid gender roles in the actual world.

I was slightly disappointed, though, that, having condemned his father for meddling in his career, the dad didn't really have any comeuppance or learn anything at the end.

Anyway, the rest of the story plays out with comforting predictability. Our two leads' other rivals for the job are underdeveloped and disappear from proceedings pretty quickly, but the magazine show format does allow a legitimate reason to pile on the festive montages. Carol singing, seasonal baking, hanging up Christmas decorations, it's all covered here, up to and including a decades-old Christmas cake that's apparently the real headline grabber.

There's nothing in particular here that you wouldn't find in Sabrina and Supes's other holiday offerings, then, but Broadcasting Christmas is nevertheless a pretty solid demonstration of why these actors fit this particular niche.

Correcting Christmas (2014 TV Movie)

Was there a discount on bulk buying red outfits?

[3/10 · 16 December 2020]

It's pretty typical in a holiday romance to find the cast clad in shades of crimson, maroon and scarlet, emphasising how characters embracing the traditional colour palette of the season have also embraced the Christmas spirit. Never, though, have I seen this trope pushed as much as in this movie, during which virtually every character spends almost every scene wearing seasonal red somewhere in their outfit. I can only imagine there was a special offer if the wardrobe department bulk bought in just one colour. The red is so prevalent that the conclusion to what passes for a love triangle is immediately telegraphed by the heroine's boyfriend being the only character not constantly dressed in the otherwise ubiquitous colour. And it's this kind of application of genre tropes with maximum laziness that characterizes this movie throughout.

It's not really a problem that the plot of Correcting Christmas - in which Kelly Overton (taking a break from vampires between True Blood and Van Helsing) gets a magical do-over to go back and correct her romantic mistakes of a Christmas past - is the sort of thing we've all seen before. After all, audiences for this kind of TV movie holiday romance expect, and often even demand, a certain amount of comfortingly predictable tropes. The chance to return to your past, do things differently and take the road not travelled remains a popular conceit for magical romance for good reason (The Family Man with Nicolas Cage would be the obvious festive take on the theme in high budget mainstream film). There isn't a viewer out there who doesn't have a past regret or two and a curiosity about how things could have turned out otherwise. So it's formulaic, yes, but it's a formula with pretty universal appeal. It's not the generic setup that's relevant here, though, it's all about how well it's executed. And that's where Correcting Christmas really comes apart.

This is a movie that doesn't just fail to pull off one convincing relationship, but does so twice for good measure. A lot of time is spent on how bad a match for her the boyfriend of Overton's Ali really is (largely expressed via the fact that he really doesn't care about the magic of Christmas or sharing it with family). In fact, it's the focus of so much of the movie that it's really hard to buy this being a relationship that has been going for years and where she honestly both expects and wishes for a Christmas proposal.

At the other corner of the "love triangle" there's Nick (so named because there's only about five festive names to go round the love interests in these movies). Ali's high school best friend, who once had a thing for her before she moved to the big city, and is now a hunky Christmas-loving small town builder, Nick is cut from the pretty standard (red plaid) cloth of a holiday movie love interest. But the movie seems to think that recognising the familiar tropes and being aware that Nick and Ali will end up together is enough that it never actually has to convince us of them as a romantic pairing. In fact, they share all of five or six scenes together in the entire movie, all brief conversations. It's also odd that the movie deems it worth mentioning her passion for her job as an architect, but does nothing with the potential connection to him being a builder. (At least have them make a gingerbread house together or something!)

In a moment of uncharacteristic self-awareness Nick even straight up tells her that they've barely talked since high school, aren't really even Facebook friends anymore and that she's probably just projecting her dissatisfaction with her current relationship onto an imagined version of him. But then in their very next scene together he's the one pushing for a happily ever after.

This sort of lack of effort isn't Correcting Christmas's only flaw (the third male lead - Ali's brother - is insufferable, with many of the same personal issues that the movie sees as problems for both Ali and her no-good boyfriend, yet he gets a happy ending without really learning or growing at all), but it is the big one. One that makes its other less-than-stellar elements harder to overlook.

In the end, then, all that red is more likely to indicate a stop sign for potential viewers of this movie than a mark of passion.

The Christmas Train (2017 TV Movie)

If only it really committed to its twist ending

[5/10 · 14 December 2020]

The standard Hallmark Christmas movie is full of chance meetings, fortunate coincidences and the stars aligning just right for romance. A magical Christmas miracle or just the contrivances of lazy filmmakers? Typically that's up to the audience and their willingness to buy into the spirit of formulaic festive romance. In the case of The Christmas Train, however, we have a movie that seems momentarily to take a genuine interest in that question. But ultimately it can't really commit to its core conceit or final reveal.

Initially, The Christmas Train catches your attention largely through having a more impressive pedigree than the average Hallmark festive flick. The movie is adapted from a best-selling novel by David Baldacci, an efficient hack writer who movie fans may remember from Absolute Power, his stolid political thriller potboiler which became a 90s Clint Eastwood movie. With The Christmas Train Baldacci seems to have been going for a mash-up of every Christmas genre - man in a midlife crisis, festive romance, a dash of mystery, nostalgic Americana - all piled onto an overcrowded train carriage.

The 90s throwback quality carries over to the cast, many of whom would have been big screen leads 25 years ago. Dermot Mulroney, the titular best friend from My Best Friend's Wedding, is now going for a kind of silver fox thing as the writer hero unsatisfied with how his life has turned out. Mulroney also had a supporting part in A-list Idris Elba-Kate Winslet romance The Mountain Between Us at the same time. And, while the snowstorm here is much faker, the romance is about as convincing. Although I'll leave you to decide whether that's praise for The Christmas Train or criticism of The Mountain Between Us. Mulroney is joined by Joan Cusack as a lonely-seeming woman with some sort of connection to a bunch of petty thefts on board the train, and Danny Glover as a sort of dollar store Spielberg: "Max Powers" (that additional "s" presumably there to distinguish his slightly outlandish name from the intentionally ludicrous new identity once adopted by Homer Simpson).

Anyway, the whole thing trundles along relatively effectively without ever leaving its predictable Hallmark movie tracks. Like its train getting trapped in a snowstorm there is perhaps a lack of forward momentum on occasion, but it works out OK. Mulroney finds himself coincidentally on board the train with an old flame who just happens to be writing the new train-themed "Max Powers" movie and the director wants them to team up. Love is unsurprisingly easily rekindled, in part inspired by a young couple desperate to marry on the train itself, if only they can keep their story straight.

Which brings us to the spoiler portion of the review and the movie's final twist. An ending which will certainly alienate some fans of the magic of Christmas formula, but which also could have really set The Christmas Train apart as a meta-festive movie that comments on the genre formula (even while still delivering a snow-covered love story). It turns out that all the little lies and mistakes that the young couple made were because they're actors hired by director Powers for his latest project: staging a Christmas miracle to get the lead couple together. Helping these soon-to-be-weds was supposed to spark the spirit of romance into our jaded older leads looking for a second chance. (Coincidentally, the young couple do get a little method in their performance and fall in love anyway). This is just one element of the director's grand scheme essentially to make a Hallmark movie in reality. He also hires Mulroney's current long distance girlfriend (also conveniently an actress hungry to work on a "Max Powers Production") to board the train and demand her boyfriend propose, forcing him to commit or get off the pot.

As his plan worked (and he ended up getting two couples together for the price of one), nobody seems to blame Powers even slightly for his enormous acts of manipulation with their private, personal lives. A more interesting version would condemn the control freak director's megalomania, even if the couple did happily get together.

And here's the issue: the "it was a setup not a festive coincidence" ending may frustrate die hard believers in the magic of Christmas, but it also doesn't want to alienate them so much that it's not an uncomplicatedly happy ending. So it fudges some of Powers' manipulation to seem more like a gentle nudge in the right direction, rather than excessive meddling from having his head turned by too much festive fiction. And too much of the plot (including the whole mystery angle) is nothing to do with the in-universe plan to engineer a real life spot of Christmas magic.

A version that went full Truman Show, with every other role played by actors, the train a sealed set, and Powers even using his special effects team to make the snow storm that strands them, might not be everyone's cup of cinnamon-spiced tea. But it would at least have a point to make about the artifice of our festive comfort viewing. As it is, though, The Christmas Train is a middle-of-the-road holiday movie with a final twist that satisfies no-one.

Love Actually (2003)

Christmas actually is the only time you'd get away with this

[6/10 · 28 November 2020]

Way back in the mid-90s it was impossible in Britain to avoid Wet Wet Wet's saccharine cover of The Troggs' Love is All Around. Thanks to its appearance in Four Weddings and a Funeral, the breakthrough movie for writer Richard Curtis, the song spent an agonising 15 weeks at Number 1 on the UK singles chart. It's a piece of baggage that Curtis seems well aware is forever attached to his name, judging by how the song's opening bars are also the backing for the opening to his directorial debut here (a film whose title appears to be a shortening of the phrase "love actually is all around").

Here the song is repurposed as a clunky festive single for Bill Nighy's over-the-hill rocker, now titled "Christmas is All Around" (the torturous need to cram in extra syllables is part of the joke). It's tempting, then, to see this opening as a slightly knowing metonym for the movie as a whole: an artist whose best work may be behind him, repackaging a past hit with new Christmas wrapping in the hope that the spirit of the season of goodwill will mean giving the laziness of the whole enterprise a pass in a way audiences might not at other times of the year. And, you know what? That would both be pretty accurate and something that Love Actually for the most part does manage to pull off.

The film's ensemble is impressively starry (all the more so in hindsight, given stories such as that involving Keira Knightley, Andrew Lincoln and Chiwetel Ejiofor were made before those actors hit major mainstream blockbuster success), which is good because the very slight narratives in which many of them are placed rely heavily on the actors' charm and established screen personas to sell them.

Top thesps Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson are given the only storyline requiring any meaty acting in a tale of emotional infidelity and a poignant use of Joni Mitchell's downbeat Christmas folk classic River. Curtis's Four Weddings star Hugh Grant is on autopilot in the formulaic but relatively effective story of a Blair-esque prime minister whose romance with the girl who brings his tea inspires him to give a darn good telling off to the US president (Billy Bob Thornton, playing the part as an unholy melange of Clinton and the younger Bush). Meanwhile, Colin Firth, so perfectly cast as the repressed but romantic love interest in the Curtis-penned Bridget Jones, is stuck in a plot where he doesn't share a single conversation with his Portuguese maid before proposing marriage, something the movie does not successfully sell as romantic. (And, hey, don't a lot of these stories involve older men and younger female subordinates? Weird, huh?)

Laura Linney has a storyline that's potentially emotionally complex, with no easy answers, so the film just kind of forgets about it in the third act and doesn't give it any answers at all. The film is, to be honest, actually better at the kind of one-joke storylines where it really can provide an answer in a couple of scenes. Kris Marshall's plot basically has him declare that he could score with women in America in a way he can't in Britain because they'd find his accent sexy (no doubt primed to do so by years of Richard Curtis romcoms!) And then he just does. It's just one scene of setup and one of pay-off, complete with cameos from hot-in-the-2000s American starlets Elisha Cuthbert and Denise Richards. It's a simplistic gag, but at least it manages to work as intended and quickly.

When it comes right down to it, though, the best thread turns out all along to have been Billy Mack and his novelty single. Nighy is full of leathery old rock star charm in an utterly winning performance. And it's not hard to buy that, in a country that has more than once propelled a sausage roll-themed novelty cover version to the top of the festive charts on sentiment and underdog spirit alone, the dreadful Christmas is All Around really could steal the coveted Christmas Number 1 slot. In a film whose love stories are mostly romantic, it's the more platonic one between Mack and Gregor Fisher as his long-suffering manager that really lands.

And, just like rooting for Christmas is All Around to make it to Number 1, real world audiences will probably forgive a lot of the crassly manipulative material in Love Actually because of the charm of the performers and the fact that, hey, it's Christmas and if ever there's a time for sentimentality it's now.

At the end of the day the film's biggest sin is not in itself but in inspiring a whole genre of holiday-themed multi-stranded romantic ensemble pieces, from Valentine's Day to New Year's Eve, all of them uniformly terrible (unlike the hit and miss Love Actually).

The Knight Before Christmas (2019)

Feels like a "title first, script second" affair

[5/10 · 24 November 2020]

In the past few years Netflix have realised that there's a huge market to be captured by muscling in on the Hallmark Christmas movie formula. Generally the streaming giant have been reluctant to tamper overly much with that formula, which has its good and bad points. Largely, though, it means predictable cosiness all round with a script that could have been written by a bot being fed festive pun titles. In fact, The Knight Before Christmas strongly gives the impression of a Netflix exec conceiving of a title first and only commissioning someone to flesh it out into a screenplay as an afterthought.

What that title points towards is a fairy tale romance where all a modern gal is missing is a really, really old fashioned guy, like centuries old. Yes, we're firmly in Kate & Leopold territory here with time travel allowing us to indulge in a fantasy of old school chivalric gentlemen without any of the problematic, messy parts of history.

Yes, history pedants are going to need to get off here, because Sir Cole (a man with the least medieval English name imaginable, at least Sir Chad would have shared his name with the medieval Saint Chad!) comes from no recognisable version of the actual Middle Ages. Mind you, such pedants probably struggle with the whole time travel genre, given that the characters speaking different languages would provide an instant stumbling block for a "realistic" take. This is a cosy romantic fantasy, so you've just got to roll with its fantasy version of a medieval knight as well. Having said that, and as this is essentially a fairy tale fantasy, it is a bit odd to give Sir Cole such a specific point of origin: Norwich in the 1330s. That was an era in which King Edward III waged war with Scotland and France, so there's probably knightly duties that range beyond a spot of falconry and time travel. Given that there's a name check for fantasy kingdom Aldovia (from A Christmas Prince, there's a lot of synergistic cross-promotion for other Netflix festive offerings here), why not just have Sir Cole be a knight of medieval Aldovia instead and remove any concerns about this fantasy's disconnect from reality?

Even the non-pedantic will find a few of Sir Cole's culture clash, fish out of water moments don't entirely make sense. His solution to needing food is to hunt a skunk with his sword (I'm pretty sure medieval knights understood the concept of buying things from a shop). Meanwhile, he views cars as "mechanical horses" (and not the far more obvious comparison "horseless carriage"), but is nevertheless completely capable of driving one a few scenes later. Like I said, there's a lot you just have to roll with.

Most clunky is Sir Cole, whose whole point in the story is to be a paragon of old fashioned chivalry, keeping referring to women as "crones". That's just not polite. Otherwise, Josh Whitehouse (romantics may recognise him as the poet with poor eyesight from the BBC's Poldark) acquits himself pretty well at the clean cut gentlemanly manners and charm part of chivalry. (Albeit less convincing as someone who'd have to be an elite battlefield troop. It's hard to imagine Whitehouse in his rumoured role in the cancelled Game of Thrones prequel).

Our heroine is Vanessa Hudgens as a teacher in an Ohio small town that's, let's be real, barely less fantastical than the movie's version of medieval Norwich. The erstwhile High School Musical actress is just the latest in a long line of former teen stars whose long term career prospects lie largely in formula genre TV movies. It's a good fit for Hudgens, though, who has a warmth and down-to-earth likeability that make her a good fit for unchallenging romance leads. It's no surprise that this isn't even her only Netflix Christmas movie.

Hudgens and Whitehouse don't exactly have sizzling chemistry, but they do seem cute together. And that's kind of symptomatic of the movie as a whole: nothing spectacular, but does its job well enough. If you're a sucker for a festive fairytale and don't ask too many questions about how any of this is supposed to work, then this is the movie for you. For anyone else it's basically formula fluff.

There's sequel bait at the end for Another Knight Before Christmas and, honestly, it's hard to imagine it not just being the same movie again. It could work, though, if instead someone from our time went back to this movie's version of the 1330s. Now that I would watch.