You can't exchange family.
This Christmas (2007)
This year Christmas with the Whitfields promises to be one they will never forget. All the siblings have come home for the first time in years and they've brought plenty of baggage with them. As the Christmas tree is trimmed and the lights are hung, secrets are revealed and family bonds are tested. As their lives converge, they join together and help each other discover the true meaning of family.
rating 7/10 User rating 140 votes 66% ❄ Christmas Connection
This Christmas is set entirely during the Christmas holiday, as the Whitfield family reunites at their mother's house for the first time in four years. Every plot thread, from affairs to musical performances to sibling rivalries, unfolds against Christmas dinner, decorating, and gift-giving. The holiday is not incidental; it is the reason everyone is in the same room.
Where to Watch
Our Review
This Christmas arrived in theaters on November 21, 2007, and did something that shouldn't have surprised anyone but did: it made $49 million worldwide on a $13 million budget. Writer-director Preston A. Whitmore II built a holiday film around a large Black family coming home for Christmas, gave it a murderers' row of a cast, and audiences showed up. The Whitfield family hasn't gathered under one roof in four years, and every single member walks through the door carrying a secret, a grudge, or both.
The Whitfield Family and the This Christmas Cast
Loretta Devine plays Ma'Dere, the Whitfield matriarch holding the family together through sheer force of will and cooking. She's the gravitational center, and Devine plays her with a warmth that never tips into sentimentality. Around her orbit six adult children, each with their own mess.
Idris Elba is Quentin, the oldest son, who returns after years of absence with a gambling debt and trouble following close behind. Elba was two years away from his star-making turn in the American market, but his screen presence here already signals someone who can carry a film. Chris Brown plays Michael "Baby," the youngest Whitfield, an aspiring singer caught between church choir and secular music. It was Brown's film debut, and the movie leans heavily on his musical talent.
Regina King plays Lisa, a sister trapped in a marriage with an unfaithful husband played by Laz Alonso. King brings the same precision she brings to everything: watch the scene where Lisa discovers the affair and tell me she isn't doing more with her eyes than most actors do with a full monologue. Columbus Short, Sharon Leal, and Lauren London round out the sibling lineup, each tangled in their own romantic complications. Lauren London, in particular, stands out as Mel, the youngest daughter navigating her own relationship drama with a quiet naturalism.
Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret
Whitmore structured the film around a simple premise: put people who love each other but don't really know each other in one house for five days and see what happens. Quentin is hiding his gambling debts. Lisa's husband is cheating. Claude (Columbus Short) has secretly married a white woman and is terrified of his family's reaction. Kelli (Sharon Leal) is having an affair with a married man. Ma'Dere herself has a new boyfriend, Joe (Delroy Lindo), and isn't sure how the children will take it.
The secrets are not revelations to the audience. The movie shows us most of them early. The tension comes from watching the family slowly figure out what we already know, and from the confrontations that follow. This is a smart structural choice. It turns the audience into co-conspirators, leaning forward in their seats waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This Christmas Movie Music
The soundtrack does serious lifting. Chris Brown performs "This Christmas" (the Donny Hathaway classic) in the film's most memorable scene, singing it at a Christmas Eve church service. The sequence works because the movie earns it. You've watched this kid get pulled between his mother's church world and his own musical ambitions for 90 minutes, and when he finally lets loose, the payoff is genuine.
Beyond Brown's performance, the film is soaked in R&B and gospel. The score leans into holiday soul rather than the orchestral swells most Christmas movies default to. It gives the film a texture and rhythm that sets it apart from its peers. You can feel the music as much as hear it.
Who Wrote This Christmas and What Makes It Work
Preston A. Whitmore II wrote and directed This Christmas, his third feature film after The Walking Dead (1995) and Crossover (2006). What Whitmore understood, and what elevates the movie above many holiday ensemble films, is pacing. He gives every subplot enough room to breathe without letting any single thread dominate. The tonal shifts between comedy, drama, and musical performance feel organic rather than jarring.
The film also benefits from refusing to make its conflicts trivial. Lisa's marital crisis isn't played for laughs. Quentin's gambling problem has real physical consequences, including a genuinely tense home invasion scene that reminds you this isn't just a cozy holiday romp. Claude's interracial marriage storyline could have been handled clumsily, but the movie treats it with more nuance than you might expect from a mid-budget holiday release.
The production design deserves credit too. The Whitfield house looks like a place where a real family lives, decorated for Christmas without looking like a department store window. The dinner table is crowded. The kitchen is always busy. Small details accumulate into something that feels lived-in.
This Christmas Film in the Landscape of Black Holiday Cinema
Before This Christmas, the options for Black families looking to see themselves in holiday movies were limited. There was The Preacher's Wife (1996), Friday After Next (2002), and scattered TV movies. This Christmas filled a gap, and its box office success proved there was a substantial audience hungry for it.
The film's legacy can be measured partly by the demand it created. Searches for "This Christmas 2" and "This Christmas movie 2" have persisted for years, with fans hoping for a sequel. As of now, no sequel has been officially announced, but the appetite says something about how deeply the original connected with its audience. People don't clamor for sequels to movies they watched once and forgot.
The Verdict
This Christmas is not reinventing the holiday movie. It is executing the formula with an above-average cast, genuine musical talent, and a script that respects its characters enough to give them real problems. Some subplots resolve too neatly. The final 15 minutes wrap up loose ends with a speed that suggests the editor was watching the clock. But Loretta Devine anchors every scene she's in, Idris Elba smolders through his, and Chris Brown's church performance is the kind of scene that sends audiences out of the theater feeling like they got their money's worth.
The Whitfield family's Christmas dinner scene, when all the secrets have finally surfaced and everyone is yelling over each other while Ma'Dere tries to hold it together, feels more like an actual holiday gathering than most movies dare to attempt.
Fun Facts
This Christmas was Chris Brown's feature film acting debut. He was 18 years old during production and performed all his own vocals, including a live rendition of Donny Hathaway's 1970 classic "This Christmas."
The film earned $49.1 million worldwide against a production budget of just $13 million, making it one of the most profitable holiday releases of 2007.
Idris Elba filmed This Christmas between seasons 4 and 5 of HBO's The Wire, where he played Stringer Bell. American audiences were only beginning to recognize him as a leading man.
Delroy Lindo, who plays Ma'Dere's boyfriend Joe, initially turned down the role but reconsidered after reading the full script and seeing the ensemble cast list.
The Whitfield house used in the film is a real residential property in Los Angeles. The production team decorated it for Christmas over three days before shooting began.
Writer-director Preston A. Whitmore II based several of the family dynamics on his own experiences growing up in a large family where Christmas was the one holiday everyone came home for.
The film's soundtrack album, featuring Chris Brown, Toni Braxton, and other R&B artists, debuted at number 5 on the Billboard 200 chart in its first week of release.
Cast
