It does stand out in one area, offering more product placement than any movie in recent memory. It's all very sad.

| Original Score: 0.5/4 | Feb 18, 2024

Reginald Hudlin’s film is self-aware, but it’s very broad and in trying to do too much achieves little.

| Dec 8, 2023

The best scenes have nothing to do with Christmas, such as Chris and Carol expressing their love and support for each other, and the children telling their father that he’s parenting for himself not them.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 7, 2023

“Candy Cane Lane” shows you that the Christmas movie as we’ve known it may be all used up, and that it has now entered its anything-goes surrealist phrase. ‘Tis the season to be batty.

| Dec 4, 2023

For the most part, though, it’s an exercise in holiday magic that barely musters a spark, executed in such by-the-numbers fashion even a closing outtakes sequence doesn’t yield any laughs.

| Dec 1, 2023

A frenzied family friendly film as overstuffed as a Christmas stocking, as nutty as a chestnut, and, ultimately, as warm as an open fire.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 1, 2023

Murphy gives a lower-key, nearly anti-less performance than we’ve seen from him in the past, letting the concept and the special effects take the lead, with him grounding the fantasy by focusing on Chris as a devoted father.

| Original Score: B | Dec 1, 2023

A madcap medley of deranged ideas that somehow manage to coalesce into a messy but half-decent Crimbo comedy. Just spare a thought for the far more interesting horror film straining to break through.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 30, 2023

The bizarro plot might help Candy Cane Lane stand out from the bland, busy crowd of new seasonal movies but it’s just as limp and lacking in spirit as the rest of them. Murphy and Ross deserve better, and so do we, and so does Christmas.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 30, 2023

The main thing to say about “Candy Cane Lane” is that Eddie Murphy is funny in it.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 30, 2023

It’s all fine. Murphy is so much more than that. Or used to be. You like to think that, given the right material, he will be again. Now that would be a gift.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 30, 2023

“Candy Cane Lane” is a stunningly uneven film that careens between cornball family drama, slapstick comedy and special-effects-laden gimmickry.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 30, 2023

You want to see Eddie Murphy surrounded by some Christmas-themed silliness. And on that score, it’s fine enough, but destined for regifting.

| Nov 30, 2023

The result swings between manic and sedative, though not always unpleasantly. The saving graces are a zesty Ellis Ross and the enigma that is Murphy, an actor whose comic timing is still casually brilliant.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 30, 2023

The narrative careens through uncompelling territory before ending on a forgettable note.

| Nov 30, 2023

[It] isn’t a chore or a travesty or anything. But certainly, it’s less than Murphy deserves.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 30, 2023