Nothing Like the Holidays: Critic Reviews

The troubles are broad, the plot twists giant, and the performances cheery in this carol to ethnic pride in Chicago's traditionally Latino Humboldt Park.

An efficient home-for-Christmas ensemble comedy trimmed with plastic teardrops.

Though the turf is well-traveled, the characters' camaraderie and their palpable sense of ethnic pride trumps the predictability and makes for a tale that is pleasantly appealing.

The ensemble cast boasts some of the finest actors in the business. They do their best to breathe life into the stereotypes, but they simply don't have enough to work with.

The movie's not really interested in originality, though. Instead, it wants to wrap the old seasonal homilies in the warm specifics of time and place and ethnicity. At that, it succeeds.

Spruce with superficial ethnic color -- as opposed to intimacy with a specific social reality -- and you've got yourself a real niche-filler.

Sometimes it's fun to unwrap a present even if you already know what's waiting inside.

Beyond the movie's seasonal familiarities of resentment and reconciliation are plenty of sweet-funny details of Latino life.

To a necessary degree the screenplay by Alison Swan and Rick Najera follows familiar formulas. But then the dialogue, the specifics, and the acting take charge, and the movie becomes funny, sad, corny, romantic, heartfelt, all when it needs to be.

It's the modest goal of a modest little picture like this--to capture something heartfelt and real, finding anyone doing anything and meaning it, regardless of how patently false the situation seems.

The cast, including Luis Guzman and Jay Hernandez, is strong and attractive but ultimately hamstrung by artificial situations and a hackneyed ending.

If the conflicts feel warmed over and the resolutions obvious, the performances, particularly those of Rodriguez, Ferlito, Messing and Pena, are so warm and winning that director Alfredo De Villa makes it a tasty entertainment.

The Rodriguezes are dealing with divorce, a war injury, cancer and even Christmas, but these setbacks are all played for jokes.

It's the latest entry in the dysfunctional family holiday genre... that dark blossoming group of films that remind us how thoroughly messed up life is even at special times before concluding that family makes it all worthwhile.

Nothing Like the Holidays is vaguely unsatisfying, caught somewhere in the middle between popcorn flick and serious cinema.

After getting past the awful title, which evokes images of madcap Christmas mayhem, Nothing Like the Holidays proves a mildly efficient holiday stocking-stuffer, albeit one whose one truly distinctive characteristic is its predominantly Hispanic cast.

'God is punishing me,' says the matriarch. Not just you.

There's nothing new under the mistletoe in this warm but generic family-stressing-for-the-holidays dramedy.

While there may well be nothing like the holidays, there's a lot that is dully familiar about the movie of the same name.

Ay Caramba, the holiday season can be difficult enough, but think how much worse it would be if you lived in a family full of movie stereotypes?

Like fruitcake, movies like this are ubiquitous at this time of the year but rarely are they devoured with great relish or enthusiasm.

Falling somewhere between a telenovela and a sitcom's big holiday show, Nothing Like the Holidays mixes family melodrama with the good cheer of the season, all with a distinct Latin flavor.

The roles are paper thin, which is too bad considering the talent of the cast. They have all been better. Molina and Leguizamo, in particular, deserve better material.

I swell with pride at this film as it's a respectable and thoroughly entertaining exploration of the bonds of a tightly knit large Puerto Rican family...

A warm, unabashedly sentimental drama...