Champagne Problems review – Netflix’s latest Christmas romcom lacks fizz

The streamer continues its annual onslaught of forgettable festive films with a mostly charmless romance set in France

At the risk of sounding like the Grinch, I must once again bemoan the release of Christmas movies before Thanksgiving; the temperatures may be dropping at long last, but it’s still too close to the gloominess of daylight savings and too far from the belt-loosening of the actual holidays to fully indulge in Netflix’s now-annual buffet of cheap Christmas confections. Nevertheless, their content conveyor belt rolls on, offering treats about as substantial and enduring as cotton candy beginning in mid-November.

Like American chocolates that no longer, in fact, contain real chocolate but sell like gangbusters on Halloween anyway, the Netflix Christmas movie, like rival holiday movie master Hallmark, is relied upon, even beloved, for its brand of badness, for its rote familiarity (nostalgic casting, basement-bargain budgets, styrofoam snow, knowingly absurd premise) and uncanny artificial filler, for its ability to deliver hits of sugary pleasure while still somehow under-delivering on expectations. At worst, these films are forgettable train wrecks (last week’s A Merry Little Ex-Mas); at best, they are forgettable fun, such as the Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle Falling For Christmas, of which I remember nothing other than cackling with my friend on her couch. (Actually, at best they are memorably ludicrous, such as last year’s impressively unserious Hot Frosty.)