No, revealing someone’s sex work past and a cancer death aren’t really what Christmas is all about. Those are just the lowlights, however, in an illuminating Christmas classic, The Best Man Holiday. The sequel to 1999’s The Best Man finds a fractured yet still familial group of friends spending the holidays together when infidelity, financial mismanagement, and betrayal strike. The performances from the film’s incredible ensemble, which includes Taye Diggs, Nia Long, Terrence Howard, and Regina Hall, are all rooted in the type of redeemable honesty that inspires the forgiveness that Christmas calls for. Coordinated displays of love, like wearing the same ugly Santa sweater as your partner and going Christmas caroling, are quintessentially in the Christmas spirit. Thanks to The Best Man Holiday, you can add four men doing a choreographed rendition of New Edition’s “Can You Stand the Rain” for the women in their lives (while decked in enough leather to cause a heat stroke in slightly hotter conditions) to that list.
