The Fitzgerald Family Christmas

Resentments, pregnancies, cancer, spousal abuse and the struggle of a recovering alcoholic all come and go on cue.

These Fitzgeralds are loud, selfish and often maddening, but they're a loving group, and you wouldn't mind spending more time with them.

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.

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.

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.

[A]chingly lovely... so full of bittersweet melancholy and yet so fixedly hopeful without ever having to touch on the sentimental...

The dysfunctional silbling-squabbling delivers diluted holiday cheer.

Burns' latest demonstrates the workmanlike skill with which he's produced a new relationship drama every one or two years.

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.

Burns gives a rare picture of another borough, showing the working-class environment he grew up in, and eulogizes: Queens, and even the beaches of Long Island when not in high season.