A Star for Christmas

Unless you're into rom-coms or anything chrimbo then avoid. Awful film, nothing to do with the cast they did what they had to do. Briana Evigan the star in "Burning Bright" couldn't even save this. The cheesey ending in the bakery bumped it up a whole star. My wife put it best "That's an hour we'll never get back." Should I tell her it was 90 minutes?

For the cheesemeisters: that ending in the bakery nearly makes it all worth while.

This rating and some of the review is probably going to sound like it has been written by somebody who hates Christmas and criticises anything Hallmark and festive. Far from the truth on all counts. Have seen some surprisingly good Hallmark films, festive and overall, and have liked some of the Christmas films seen recently from this year because they succeeded in charming the viewer and warming the heart regardless of the cliches and formulaic storytelling.

'A Star for Christmas' is not one of the best of my recent Christmas film viewings seen as such a fan of Christmas and needing some serious distracting from health woes. Neither is it one of the worst. Somewhere in the low middle if anything. It is certainly semi-watchable and much better than the basic plotline looks like on the page, with some things noticeably done quite well. 'A Star for Christmas' is also not a great film either, with some obvious flaws that are as noticeable as the good things. So not a must see but far from a must avoid as well.

Will start with 'A Star for Christmas' good things. It is nicely photographed and has a quite magical atmosphere in its best parts. Always love nostalgic festive soundtracks, and 'A Star for Christmas' is no exception to that. There is nothing mean-spirited about it and there are moments of charm and heart.

Corey Sevier is a likeable male lead and Brooke Burns steals every scene that she is in.

Briana Evigan is significantly less good though, she looked and sounded wrong for her role which needed someone younger to pull it off rather than someone trying too hard and coming over as annoying and affected. The rest of the cast felt overdone too in very cliched and unsubtly written roles. The dialogue has its moments but really could have done with more energy and too much is very forced and cheesy.

Direction tends to be too routine. Predictability is inevitable in festive Hallmark films, but the predictability here was excessive with at times contrived situations and stereotypical characters and the pace was like the dialogue, more energy was needed. The ending is even cheesier than the dialogue and is also incredibly rushed and unrealistic, especially regarding the antagonist.

In summary, pretty mediocre. 4/10.

Greg Evigan will always be the dude from "BJ and the Bear". That was a TV series that was a ripoff of "Smokey and the Bandit". His TV Legacy continued with the "My Two Dads". Not exactly the best television shows ever made. If those shows were not bad enough he was able to get his daughters Vanessa and Briana in the business. Luckily in this film we get the more talented daughter Briana but they should of cast Vanessa.

In this film a Hollywood film comes to a small town and the big star of the film sweeps a local baker off her feet. Then when things start moving along the movie stars ex-girlfriend gets cast in his film and she is out to get him back at any cost.

One major gripe I also have about this film is the fact it is not really "A Christmas Theme" film. I have a feeling it wasn't originally set during the holidays. There is no "Christmas Feeling" at all to this production.

There is plenty of things to like about this film however the last 20 minutes and the final scene is stupid. Briana is great but she deserves a better role.

If your looking forward to watching a "Christmas Theme" film skip this . If you are looking for something good skip this.

CSPAN has more more entering moments than this film

The storyline in this movie was abysmal. I hope the writers have gone on to bigger and better things because the world does not need more movies like this written. But what saved it was the acting. Movies like this tend to be really over-acted, and this one wasn't. Specifically, kudos to the girl playing Cassie, who I thought had wasted her talent playing this poorly written character.

I decided to check this out because it has a few people we've liked in later movies, including Briana Evigan. Corey Seivier was excellent in Noel Next Door in 2022 (last year as I write this).

The film started out with two of the most annoying pieces of "new wave" Christmas music I've ever heard, and my first impression was that we would bag this one quickly. Second, it was obviously going to include baking, which I'm exceptionally tired of in Christmas movies.

However, we hung in there for a while and the movie had just enough cute or funny moments to keep me from opting out. It got better as it went along, and gave us some audible laughs.

Briana Evigan is a strange sort of actress. Many of her lines are delivered with too much understatement, and she sounds constantly hoarse. She overcomes that to provide charming characters you root for, however.

This isn't a repeat watch for us, but we were glad to see it once.