Metacritic reviews

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.

A rare holiday treat, a package that's both thoughtfully selected and sure to please its intended recipients.

The result is a big, gushy, emotional, secret-driven, family-obsessive casserole, perhaps facile in some of its resolutions, but so full of good heart and love -- the real kind, which is scratchy, awkward, difficult to express and doesn't conquer all but just some -- that the movie is difficult to resist.

Overstuffed, formulaic but very easy to take.

Enjoyable enough. Though like some holiday fare, it doesn't quite stay with you.

Writer-director Preston A. Whitmore II throws enough soap opera for an entire TV season into a story that nearly -- but not quite -- sinks from the weight of all these implausible events. Animated acting and the sheer chaos of this squabbling family give the film a comic buoyancy.

Boisterous and bittersweet, the film is not dull, but it does feel hopelessly overstuffed, with scant time to devote to any one story line.

Not a bad movie, per se. It's just harmless and bland and dull and predictable, and sometimes that's worse than a bad movie.

The cast has spirit, but the dialogue and situations are phonier than the Yule log on TV.

It’s redemption through sentimentality, salvation through schmaltz.