2025 Holiday Romance Movie Recaps! Part 2!
If you’re just stumbling upon my movie roundups, I made a gigantic master list of holiday romance movies I’ve reviewed over the years.
And now here are two more for 2025! We’ve got a Broadway has-been trying to get back to the state and a heist!
Title: The Snow Must Go On
Network: Hallmark
Notable Stars: Nada
Premise: A struggling Broadway star agrees to direct his niece’s play to impress a producer, finds a new lady friend along the way.
Plotty stuff:
We open on Isaiah (Corey Cott) singing to an empty cabaret; he’s the star of a one-man show he wrote and produced himself about reindeer politics. After, his sister (and an Asian woman I initially thought was her wife but turns out to be her teenage daughter) talks him into coming upstate for Christmas. He hesitates because he has a big audition the next day. But then the audition is a bust AND he gets fired from his day job because the audition made him late for work. So he goes upstate to his sister’s small town to lick his wounds. When he gets to his sister’s place, Isaiah offers to pick up his niece, Aurora, from school. On his way in, he meets a cute teacher (Heather Hemmens) who brings him to a music room, where the music teacher has just quit. So, the kids need someone to direct the Christmas play. And also finish writing it. Even though Christmas is a couple of days away. Look, I was Theater Kid adjacent in high school (I played in the orchestra) and this is just not how it would go down. But Isaiah lets Aurora talk him into taking over.
The cute teacher, Lilly-Anne, is helping keep Isaiah on task. He learns that one of the students in the play is the daughter of “the biggest producer on Broadway right now!” so now he plans to use the play to impress this producer.
At auditions (like these wouldn’t have happened in October) Isaiah helps a really shy kid and sings and dares a kid who disrupts the audition to audition, but the kid chickens out and runs off stage. Lilly-Anne has hearts in her eyes through all this. Lilly-Anne talks Isaiah into getting the disruptive kid, Stephen, to audition, and you will never believe this, but he has a great voice. (There’s not much about this actor, Axel Hansen, online, but he seems like a kid who would have played Evan Hansen or something. There are a lot of IRL Theater Kids in this ensemble, is what I’m saying.)
The kids think the play Isaiah wrote in one afternoon sucks. Isaiah casts himself as the lead (Randolph the Christmas Elk) as a way to backdoor audition for the big producer. He gives the producer’s daughter a big part in the play, and while she does have a great voice, she also just wants to be in the ensemble. Lilly-Anne helps Isaiah rewrite the play. She finds him charming, he’s really impressed with her (he mentions at one point that she’s a guidance counselor, which he finds “heroic”).
Of course, a bunch of things go wrong with the play, as is required. So, will the play go on? When Lilly-Anne tries to get him a job as the replacement drama teacher (even though he doesn’t have any credentials, but who cares about such things), will he accept or spiral into an existential crisis about where he is in his life? Will Isaiah’s overwrought performance as the Christmas Elk impress the Broadway producer? Will Isaiah and Lilly-Anne live happily ever after?
Holiday Shenanigans the Characters Get Up to While Falling in Love: They lay down under the town’s Christmas tree. They go to a holiday market and see an outdoor movie together. Isaiah, Aurora, and the beardy neighbor who has a crush on Isaia’s sister decorate the sister’s house because she’s been too busy to decorate much. Isaiah helps Lilly-Anne pick out a sad Charlie Brown Christmas tree. And of course there’s the play, which is a musical where they use well-known Christmas tunes but change the lyrics.
Does it snow? Off screen; a snowstorm prevents some of set that Isaiah ordered from arriving on time. There’s also a malfunctioning snow machine, so there’s fake snow.
Other thoughts: Corey Cott is an actual Broadway star; his most recent credit was The Heart of Rock and Roll, the recent Huey Lewis musical. In the movie, Isaiah was the star of a Broadway show called I See You, which we see clips of — he’s got a great voice — but the poster is clearly from Corey Cott’s time in Newsies. He’s legit funny in this movie, and he sings like a Broadway pro.
There’s SO MUCH PLOT for a movie this short. And it all kind of boils down to whether Isaiah will choose Lilly-Anne and the small town or Broadway, although it seems like NYC is accessible by train from said small town, so why not both? (Like, it seems unreasonable of Lilly-Anne, a woman he met like a week ago, to demand that he become a small-town drama teacher instead of pursuing the dream he’s clearly had his whole life of being on Broadway, but what do I know?)
There’s also a lot of singing, and I’m retroactively mad that the Hallmark movie featuring Aaron Tveit, a huge Broadway star who has a Tony, does not feature much singing at all.
There’s a “concepts of a plan” joke, which feels awfully loaded for Hallmark.
Should you track it down on streaming? Sure? It’s fine? It’s really Corey Cott’s show, though; he acts circles around everyone else in the movie.
***
Title: Jingle Bell Heist
Network: Netflix
Notable Stars: Only if you consume a lot of British telly.
Premise: Two people who need money team up to raid the vault of a department storeowner.
Plotty stuff:
We open on B-roll of London, so I guess that’s where we are. What you need to know is basically that American Sophia (Olivia Holt) works at a fancy department store with a terrible boss (Peter Serafinowicz) AND works nights as a bartender, and Nick (Connor Swindells, who I know mostly as bisexual bully Adam on Sex Education and the dweeby Mattel employee in the Barbie movie) is struggling financially while also working a job he hates at an electronics repair shop. Sophia is also a good pickpocket. Nick has hacked into the security cameras at the store and catches Sophia lifting some cash from the store’s secure storage room; he seems to be a small-time thief, too. Sophia’s British mum has cancer, so I guess that’s why she’s in London.
Nick goes to the store and lets Sophia know he knows her secret. They meet after hours, and he tries to talk her into stealing more from the store; she says no way but also boosts his wallet. Then she gets news that her mother needs expensive medical care, but going through the NHS will take too long, so now she needs money for that. Since she has Nick’s wallet, she tracks him down to work and says she’s in but wants half. They agree.
Their first attempt is a bust; Nick creates a diversion while Sophia sneaks into the secure storage area, but someone has already moved all the expensive jewelry. Except no, actually, it was stolen, and Sophia thinks Nick cut her out of their deal. He didn’t, but when she confronts him, she discovers he has a kid; he’s trying to get his life together so his ex-wife doesn’t move the kid to Birmingham. They set their sights higher and decide to rob the safe in Sophia’s boss’s office. They run into all kinds of roadblocks. And then the heist itself takes place on Christmas Eve. There are some fun twists and turns at the end.
So, will Nick and Sophia successfully complete their heist? Will they fall in love along the way?
Perennial bitchy tertiary character actress Lucy Punch plays the boss’s wife.
Holiday Shenanigans the Characters Get Up to While Falling in Love: The hot toy this Christmas is something called a Mooshy Fox that becomes kind of a fun recurring motif. Kids keep vomiting on the line to see Santa in the store, and Sophia keeps getting asked to clean it up. They go ice skating with Nick’s daughter. But most of the shenanigans are related to the heist. These include things like attending a party dressed in Santa suits and sneaking into a fancy gala.
Does it snow? Alas, no.
Other thoughts:
Honestly, I think this is really a story about the failures of the American health insurance industry. Sophia is in the UK so her mom can take advantage of their free health care.
I think my actual favorite character in this movie is Nick’s roommate, Ralph (Michael Salami).
The pacing feels very slow for a heist movie to me. Swindells and Holt are cute and funny, but the movie drags a bit. It picks up in the last 20 minutes though.
Should you track it down on streaming? Yeah. Despite slow pacing, it’s pretty fun.