Nutcrackers (2024)

There is a moment in Nutcrackers where Ben Stiller, playing Michael Maxwell, a buttoned-up Chicago businessman who has just inherited four chaotic nephews, watches one of the boys leap gracefully across a barn. He looks like a man being physically moved by something he has no vocabulary for. That expression, somewhere between bewilderment and surrender, is the best thing in the movie. It is also, unfortunately, about as deep as the movie gets.

Nutcrackers premiered as the opening film of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival before landing on Hulu on November 29, 2024. Director David Gordon Green, the man who gave us the Halloween reboot trilogy and the underseen Joe, built the entire film around a genuinely unusual discovery: four real brothers from Blanchester, Ohio, who are trained ballet dancers and also live on a farm full of animals, trampolines, and dirt bikes. The screenplay by Leland Douglas then wrapped a fairly standard fish-out-of-water shell around them.

The Janson Brothers Are the Real Movie

Homer, Ulysses, and twins Arlo and Atlas Janson are not playing characters. They are playing versions of themselves, in their actual house, with their actual animals. Green visited the family, saw what they had, and wrote a movie around it. That approach pays off in almost every scene the boys are in. Homer, the oldest, has been training in ballet for close to seven years, and it shows. When the film stops trying to be a comedy and just watches these kids dance, something real happens on screen.

The four brothers had never acted before. In a film populated by seasoned professionals, that should be obvious. It mostly isn't. The older two carry their scenes with unforced naturalism, and the twins achieve what professional child actors often fail at: they seem to have no awareness of the camera at all.

Stiller, returning to a lead film role for the first time in seven years (he has spent that time directing, most notably the Apple TV+ series Severance), is doing honest work here. Michael Maxwell is not a warm man who learns to be warm. He is a man who slowly, reluctantly accepts that his life has been rerouted without his permission. Stiller plays the reluctance straight, which is the right call.

What the Film Gets Wrong

The script does not trust the story it actually has. The Janson brothers, their farm, the tension between Michael's world and theirs: that is enough material for a film. Instead, Nutcrackers imports the full catalog of holiday comedy conventions. There is a meddling social worker. There is a climactic ballet recital. There is a wealthy relative who threatens to split the family up. Linda Cardellini is given almost nothing to do as the social worker Gretchen Rice, which is a genuine waste. Tim Heidecker and Toby Huss are similarly underused.

The film's bigger structural problem is pacing. Green lingers on scenes that have already made their point, and rushes through moments where you want him to stay. The farm feels alive when the camera simply observes it. When the screenplay kicks in with its mechanics, the air goes out of the room.

Rotten Tomatoes' consensus called it "about as delightful as getting socks for Christmas," which is a bit harsh and also not entirely wrong. The film has real warmth in it. It just can't always find it.

Is Nutcrackers Worth Watching?

For a family film released in the holiday window, the answer is yes, with some asterisks. It is not a sharp comedy. It is not a particularly original drama. But it has four kids who are genuinely compelling to watch, a lead actor giving a performance more grounded than the material demands, and a setting that feels specific and real in a genre that usually goes to great lengths to feel generic.

The Murphy Theater ballet sequence, shot in Wilmington, Ohio, is the film's best scene. It earns the title.

Hulu reportedly paid $12 million for the film following its TIFF premiere. For a modestly budgeted family drama built around first-time child actors from rural Ohio, that is a significant vote of confidence. The result doesn't fully justify it, but it's closer than the 46% Rotten Tomatoes score suggests.