Laden with false climaxes, the overstuffed plot leaves you exhausted well before the movie ends, and the amiable actors sleepwalk through their uninspired roles.

| Original Score: 2/6 | Apr 14, 2007

What's interesting about typical Hollywood Christmas movies is that regardless of how crass, vulgar, or mean-spirited they may be, by the last scene they will inevitably try to wrap viewers in a blanket of warm seasonal cheer.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Dec 30, 2006

Got any kids who've been naughty this year? Here's their present.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 30, 2006

'My stupidity astounds me!' chortles Danny DeVito in Deck the Halls, a line that pretty much sums up this tale of warring neighbours with very different ideas about celebrating Christmas.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 30, 2006

This one follows the depressing pattern of Surviving Christmas and Christmas With the Kranks: enforced holiday cheer gives way to bilious hatred, then hollow forgiveness.

| Dec 26, 2006

[Deck the Halls] wants to be both naughty and nice, but just ends up feeling deeply confused.

| Original Score: D | Dec 2, 2006

There is something about the holiday season that brings lazy filmmakers to pitch meetings with Frank Capra knockoffs clutched in their sweaty paws.

Full Review | Nov 23, 2006

It's a holiday ritual: Each year, American moviegoers get the misanthropically stupid, plastic-satire-of- a-plastic-society Christmas comedy they deserve.

| Original Score: C- | Nov 23, 2006

I literally did not count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hucksters who made it, on their way to the bank.

| Nov 22, 2006

As long as atrocious, fake-pine duds like this keep making their money back, there's no such thing as a Christmas that's too commercial.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Nov 22, 2006

Looking for some early holiday cheer? Look at anything but Deck the Halls.

| Original Score: 0.5/4 | Nov 22, 2006

The raw ingredients of this crass holiday comedy include an inept stab at Home Alone-style slapstick, sitcom-thin characters, a snickering attitude about tacky yuletide decorations and a good helping of smarmy sentimentality. Merry Christmas!

| Original Score: 0/4 | Nov 22, 2006

The ending is so sweet that it'll send your family out of the theater for 3 1/2 solid minutes of smiles before everyone starts drinking and pointing fingers again.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 22, 2006

As reliable as your Aunt Harriet's sweet potato casserole, every holiday season brings a movie just like John Whitesell's Deck the Halls, in which otherwise sensible actors commit themselves to a cheerless exercise in jingle bell hell.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 22, 2006

Movies like Deck the Halls should make us all thankful that Christmas only comes once a year. What other season could possibly inspire a story as insipid as this?

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 22, 2006

Although it borrows ingredients from many familiar Christmas flicks, it's got a sly twinkle of its own.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 22, 2006

Since this is ostensibly a holiday family picture, things never get so nasty as to be Bad Santa-style outrageous, unless you think a rigged speed-skating competition or a cross-dressing local sheriff is the height of hilarity.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 22, 2006

You cannot believe how excruciatingly awful this movie is.

Full Review | Original Score: 0.5/4 | Nov 22, 2006

How come the talk-radio blowhards never bring movies like this up when they're inveighing against the War on Christmas?

| Original Score: 1/4 | Nov 22, 2006

Mr. Broderick and Mr. DeVito look tired and out of sorts, and you can hardly blame them, given the picture's inept, curdled mixture of sappiness and crude humor.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Nov 22, 2006