These days, Christmas movies, broadly and charitably defined, seem to be synonymous with the brassy, hokey, sickly sweet sort of fare that has a permanent home on the Hallmark Channel and is in perpetual rotation on Netflix. But the slop being served on Netflix — Falling for Christmas, Best. Christmas. Ever!, Christmas with You, to name a sampling — is in no way representative of a genre with a long and honorable tradition. Classic films such as Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, and the final quarter of Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You are not only set during the season but also use their tinselled Christmastime setting as a kind of reflecting pool for their characters’ hopes and woes, especially of the romantic sort. Surely nothing is sadder than Christmas in a state of solitude, and nothing more fervently wished for than Christmas in the company of another.

Jay Duplass’s new comedy, The Baltimorons, is not in the league of those masterpieces, but, with the admirable exception of 2023’s The Holdovers, it is the closest thing to a fully and richly realized Christmas movie in recent memory. The film, which largely unfolds on Christmas Eve, has a wonderful sense of the dying light of a late December day, the transition from a shade of damp gray to the inky black of night, and, even better, an actual sense of a particular American place. As the title suggests, the film is set in Baltimore, whose landmarks, neighborhoods, underpasses, and professional football team are well evoked.

For a film to get its atmosphere and setting right is a good sign that it may get its humor and heart right, too. Happily, this proves to be the case. Michael Strassner, who co-wrote the film........

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