Christmas with You (2022)

Freddie Prinze Jr. had not made a romantic comedy in roughly twenty years when he agreed to do Christmas with You. He said in interviews that he returned to acting because his daughter became interested in performing, and he wanted to show her how it worked. So he picked a Latino-led holiday rom-com shot in New York, playing a widowed dad named Miguel who lives in a small upstate town and once had a music career. If that sounds like a very deliberate set of choices rather than a random script that landed on his desk, that's because it was.

The movie knows exactly what it is. It does not try to be more.

The Setup: A Pop Star, a Wish, and Washington Heights

Aimee Garcia plays Angelica, a Latina pop star struggling with a label pushing her toward generic Christmas music instead of the original material she actually wants to record. When a viral video surfaces of a teenage girl named Cristina singing one of Angelica's older songs in Spanish, Angelica tracks the kid down and shows up at her door in upstate New York. The kid's father is Miguel. The rest follows the standard romantic-comedy clock with reasonable precision.

Garcia is good at this. She played Ella Lopez on Lucifer for six seasons and has a loose, naturalistic quality that makes even underwritten moments feel lived-in. Her Angelica is believable as someone quietly exhausted by the machinery of fame, which gives the quieter scenes in Miguel's kitchen a grounded quality that the plot barely earns.

Prinze Jr.'s Miguel is softer than his early 2000s persona, and that's a feature, not a bug. The character is a little underwritten on the page, but Prinze plays him with enough warmth and low-key wit that it works. He admitted in press for the film that he was nervous on set in a way he hadn't been since his first movie. It doesn't show, which is the point.

What Actually Works

The film was shot entirely in New York in late 2021, with Manhattan providing the big-city sequences and the Hudson Valley standing in for Miguel's small-town home. The United Palace theater in Washington Heights, a nearly century-old venue that was originally built as a movie palace in 1930, appears in the film and is genuinely beautiful on screen. It's one of those locations that makes you realize a mid-budget Netflix production occasionally lucked into something architecturally spectacular.

The music angle is handled better than expected. Garcia sings, and the original songs written for the film are serviceable pop-Latin holiday material. The central conflict about artistic integrity versus commercial pressure is not explored with any real depth, but it functions as a reason for Angelica to be where she is, and the film's resolution is emotionally satisfying even if the music industry politics are sketched in crayon.

The Latino representation here is more than window dressing. Spanish appears naturally in family scenes. The traditions feel specific rather than decorative. The predominantly Latino cast, which was cited by Prinze Jr. as one of his main reasons for taking the role, gives the film a cultural specificity that the holiday genre often strips away in pursuit of a generic universal warmth. This movie has warmth, but it belongs to a particular community.

Where It Stumbles

The script by screenwriter Keya McNeil does not take any risks with the structure. Every beat arrives on schedule. The misunderstanding that creates the third-act crisis is telegraphed about forty minutes before it happens. The supporting characters, including a cynical music label executive and Angelica's manager, exist only to create obstacles and then disappear.

At 89 minutes the film doesn't outstay its welcome, but it also doesn't use its runtime to do anything unexpected. Director Gabriela Tagliavini keeps things moving and the performances grounded, which is the right call for this material. You could call it efficient. You could also call it a little thin.

The Cristina subplot, where the teenage daughter's Christmas wish kicks off the plot, is never quite resolved in a way that feels fully satisfying. The movie is nominally about Angelica and Miguel, but Cristina is the engine of the story, and what she actually gets out of the experience is treated as secondary to the romance.

The Verdict on "Is This a Christmas Movie?"

It absolutely is. The holiday setting is not incidental. The film's entire emotional logic runs on Christmas wish fulfillment: a girl wishes to meet her idol, the wish comes true, and it changes several lives. Snow, lights, a holiday gala, and a climactic song that is very much a Christmas song all anchor this firmly in December.

It's a 6 out of 10 film that many people will enjoy rather more than that score implies, because the score reflects craft and the enjoyment reflects warmth. Sometimes those are different things. This is a movie you put on with someone you like, under a blanket, in November or December, and it does its job without embarrassing itself.

Freddie Prinze Jr. got his daughter to see how it worked. She apparently liked watching it. That's probably the best review the film could receive.