THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER (2024)

Yes — and bring the tissues. This is a comedy that earns its laughs in the first half and its tears in the second. The setup is a delight: the meanest kids in town take over the leading roles in a small town's beloved Christmas pageant, and the town assumes disaster. What actually unfolds is a story about grace reaching people nobody expected to be reached.

The film opens a bit slow, and a handful of minor cautions are worth knowing — some light profanity (quickly rebuked), scuffling and snowball-pelting violence played for family-friendly laughs, and children smoking a cigar in a couple of scenes. None of it derails the movie or its message.

What you get in return is a strong, plainly Christian story about transformation, love of neighbor, and the true meaning of Christmas, delivered with real warmth and a small-town charm that lands. Gather the family and watch it together this season.

In the town of Emmanuel, the annual Christmas Pageant is the event of the year — this year, its 75th. When the longtime director takes a fall and can't direct, Grace steps in. Her problem: the only volunteers for Mary, Joseph, the Wise Men, and the Angel are the Herdmans, the most notoriously rotten kids in town, who've never even heard the Christmas story before. What happens next is the whole delight of the movie — and we'll leave it there.

Four stars, and the film earns every one of them by the finish, even though it doesn't start that way. The opening stretch runs slightly slow as the town and its cast of characters get established. But once the Herdmans collide with the pageant, the film turns funny, then genuinely emotional — the source calls the ending "heart-rending, powerful and uplifting," strong praise for a small-town Christmas comedy. Along the way it captures a real warmth: the feel of a small town at Christmas, and the particular comedy of watching the worst-behaved kids in town wrestle with a story about grace they've never heard before. The result is a film built to make you laugh and then, without much warning, make you cry.

This is an unapologetically Christian film, and it wears that plainly. Its center is the true meaning of Christmas — not sentiment, but the birth of a Savior who transforms lives. Its engine is redemption: the Herdmans, drawn to church for the free food, end up drawn instead into the story of Mary and the manger, and the film trusts that encountering that story can genuinely change a person. Its ethic is neighbor-love — treating others, even the ones you've already written off, the way you'd want to be treated yourself.

The film doesn't dodge the cost of that grace. The town wants to keep the Herdmans out of the pageant precisely because they don't deserve the good roles — which is, of course, the entire point of grace. Light misused language appears but is rebuked on-screen rather than shrugged off, and the film's few rough edges (some pushing, hitting, a stolen cigar) are treated as exactly what they are: bad behavior in children who haven't yet met something better.

At its heart, this is a story about the outsider brought in and remade — which is the gospel's oldest story. "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17).

This is the rare pageant story that earns both its laughs and its tears — a slow start that gives way to something genuinely moving about grace reaching the people everyone else had given up on. Small cautions aside, it's a warm, funny, faithfully Christian family film worth your Christmas season. Worth the trip.