**This movie is rated TV-MA for smoking and language**

Netflix recently released its new holiday movie called “Holidate” starring “American Horror Story” Emma Roberts and “The Best of Me’s” Luke Bracey as Sloane and Jackson, two single people who don’t have dates for the holidays. They are both constantly bombarded with random people their families try to set them up with, so to avoid the constant hindrance about their love lives from their families, they come up with the idea of being each other’s “holidate”. 

A “holidate” is a date to family gatherings and other obligations during the holidays. The movie goes around a full year of them going to parties and family gatherings together. It starts and ends with Christmas and focuses heavily on Thanksgiving as well. This film also stars “Grey’s Anatomy’s” Jessica Capshaw and “Saturday Night Live’s” Alex Moffat.

This movie is a great welcome into the holiday season, but you can watch it any time of year, as it covers most major holidays. It did a really good job of incorporating every major holiday and going in chronological order, starting after Christmas with New Years. 

However, I thought the movie was very fast paced and didn’t really develop a strong relationship or chemistry between the main characters. Sloane and Jackson only really hung out around holidays and it never showed us any content of them together outside of a holiday. I would’ve liked to see more of a relationship develop between the main characters and show some context between holidays. When the next holiday in the year-long sequence came along, they just acted like they had been hanging out all the time and nothing changed since the last time they had met up, but they never showed or mentioned anything that inferred that they had been seeing each other between holidays.

On the plus side, there was a lot of good comedy and jokes that were made throughout the film. Sloane’s family is very dysfunctional, which made for some funny banter and some of the weird and awkward situations the characters were put in made for some laughs, like when Sloane runs into her former boyfriend and his new girlfriend at the mall and Jackson just so happens to be there at that crucial time. Like most rom-coms out there, the main characters end up together in this film as well. I thought because of this inevitable ending, the story line lacked suspense. I would’ve liked an element of surprise for the ending or for something that I didn’t expect, to happen. However, that never came. 

Overall, I rate this movie a three out of five stars. I think this movie makes for a great introduction to the fall or holiday season, since it’s heavily set around Thanksgiving and Christmas. However, the acting was subpar and I wish it had a deeper meaning or storyline to go off of.