The Fitzgerald Family Christmas Reviews
Flick Filosopher
[A]chingly lovely... so full of bittersweet melancholy and yet so fixedly hopeful without ever having to touch on the sentimental...
Top CriticThese Fitzgeralds are loud, selfish and often maddening, but they're a loving group, and you wouldn't mind spending more time with them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Burns remains an agreeable presence throughout, and the emotions mostly ring true, even if the comic elements feel overly broad and individual episodes are hit-and-miss.
A holiday-themed piece shot through with humor and heartbreak. No bull. And low on sappy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
SSG Syndicate
The dysfunctional silbling-squabbling delivers diluted holiday cheer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
Paste Magazine
Burns' latest demonstrates the workmanlike skill with which he's produced a new relationship drama every one or two years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6.2/10
Manages the considerable feat of interweaving the personal dramas of nine members of a boisterous Irish-American clan into a coherent mosaic with a streamlined narrative drive.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Burns has assembled such a fine cast that we leave feeling satisfied, as if we didn't get the iPad mini we wanted, but a pretty good novel instead.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The Fitzgerald Family Christmas is extremely perceptive about certain angles on life in a big family.
Anchoring the film as much as his character does his family, Burns displays such an affable screen presence that one is able to overlook the film's hoarier aspects.
A genuine charmer with appealingly natural performances and the kind of holiday warmth that can't be manufactured.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Blu-ray.com
A fertile battlefield of sibling discontent and parental resentment, creating a prickly but inviting familial atmosphere that offers enough variation in woe to ease the script out of its occasional dalliance with clumsy melodrama.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Burns's job as director is differentiating and spotlighting everyone in this large ensemble, a storytelling challenge to which he responds with a brisk pace and an eye for revealing moments.
Spirituality and Practice
A holiday drama that depicts the miracle of forgiveness in the midst of a storm of familial conflict and misunderstandings.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
An unpretentiously ingratiating dramedy about members of an Irish-American clan drawn together, whether they want to be or not, for a yuletide celebration.
Aisle Seat
A terrific holiday movie. Edward Burns' most invigorating, heartfelt picture in years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Resentments, pregnancies, cancer, spousal abuse and the struggle of a recovering alcoholic all come and go on cue.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Cinemalogue.com
The ensemble cast is mostly agreeable, but the script eventually bogs down amid too many characters and too many contrivances.
Too much of the film is taken up by creaky plot devices and one sibling vowing to track down and talk to another one to resolve a problem.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
So little action takes place that really, the setting could just be adjoining couches, with characters shouting affectionate quips and insults at each other.
