THAT CHRISTMAS

Here's the decision. Richard Curtis has adapted a children's book trilogy into a bright, lively animated feature with an A-list voice cast — Bill Nighy, Brian Cox and more — and at its heart it honors something Scripture honors: families and neighbors pulling together when a blizzard strands their seaside town.

But the film opens by turning a children's Nativity play into a joke, complete with a watermelon "pregnancy" that rolls off the stage and a young Mary declaring, "I've made up my mind; I'm keeping the baby" — a line the source reads as an abortion reference aimed at little viewers. Add Santa's "magic" standing in for the season's meaning, mild profanity, light nudity, and pratfall violence, and you have a movie that earns its caution for children of all ages.

So: this is one to watch at home, where you control the pause button and can talk your kids through what the movie gets wrong before it colors what Christmas means. Preview it first.

In the little seaside town of Wellington-on-Sea, everyone has holiday plans — and then a massive blizzard rolls in and buries them.

The storm separates families and strands the children, who have to fend for themselves. Danny, a new boy already smarting from a rough school play and an absent dad, is one of them. So are twin girls Charlie and Sam — one "naughty," one anxious to be "nice." As the snow keeps falling and one child goes missing, a scattered community has to improvise its way back to each other.

Two stars, and here's what they mean. On the surface, THAT CHRISTMAS delivers what a holiday cartoon should: color, movement, lively animation, and a voice cast stacked with talent. Those are real pleasures, and younger viewers will feel them.

The source doesn't cash out much beyond that, and the film's larger problem isn't craft but content — a story that keeps undercutting its own warmth with jokes and detours that don't belong in a children's Christmas movie. The result is pleasant to look at and genuinely kind in places, but tonally muddled and never quite as good as its cast.

Underneath the snow, THAT CHRISTMAS believes something good: that neighbors are meant to carry one another, that families improvise and sacrifice to reunite, and that a "naughty" child can turn generous. When Charlie secretly gives her own gift to her anxious sister, the movie touches real Christian instinct. That mainly biblical view of helping one another is the film's best self.

But the film also muddies the season it celebrates. Christmas here runs on Santa's "magic" rather than on the child in the manger, and the source names this as false religion — a substitute wonder standing in for the real one. A humanist streak surfaces too, most sharply in that opening school play, where the girl playing Mary announces she's "keeping the baby," a line the source reads as an abortion reference planted in a children's Nativity. Turning the birth of Christ into that kind of punchline is where the movie earns its harshest mark.

So weigh it plainly: a warm heart about community, wrapped around a hollowed-out Christmas and a joke no child needs to hear.

The longing the film feels — for scattered people to be gathered home in a storm — is real, and Scripture answers it in the very birth this Nativity mocks: "For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given" (Isaiah 9:6).

There's real warmth in this snowy little town, and kids will love the color and the voices. But between the hollowed-out Christmas and a Nativity played for a cheap laugh, this one needs a parent in the room. So here's our answer, the same one we opened with: wait for home — preview it, then watch together and talk it through. Want something to enjoy without the caveats? Try our latest family-friendly picks.