All The Movies Coming To Netflix This Week (Nov. 17-23)

Netflix is now definitively in holiday mode as a new Vanessa Hudgens Christmas movie debuts on the service.

“The Knight Before Christmas” stars Hudgens in a movie about a knight that time travels into her character’s life right before Christmas. I feel confident in saying the screenwriter had the movie title first and then tried to figure out what story could fit into that pun. I can’t wait for future Netflix Christmas rom-coms based on puns, like maybe “Kiss the Season” (self-explanatory) or “Elf-Love” (about an elf that learns to love itself) or “Candy Cane…ine” (about a lovable Christmas dog), all of which I’ve just obviously trademarked. You can read more about “The Knight Before Christmas” below as well as watch the trailer.

The service also adds a few documentaries including the Original “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator,” about the sordid history surrounding the rise of Bikram yoga. You can read the full list of movies joining the service at the bottom of this article.

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Notable Movie: “The Knight Before Christmas” (Netflix Film), Nov. 21

Josh Whitehouse and Vanessa Hudgens in "The Knight Before Christmas."

Josh Whitehouse and Vanessa Hudgens in “The Knight Before Christmas.”

Details: Netflix hasn’t shown this movie to critics yet, so I can only base the following synopsis off the trailer. But the apparent formulaic nature of this holiday rom-com (and the fact that the trailer seems to give away the entire plot) leads me to believe my synopsis won’t be too misleading …

A valiant knight time travels from his era into contemporary Christmastime. He unfortunately/fortunately appears in modern time on a road, where a woman hits him with her car. Thankfully he’s wearing some armor! “Fear not! I’ve been thrown much further by much faster horses than your steel steed,” the knight says. He generally just rolls with the time-travel thing, but hijinks ensue when he doesn’t understand certain technologies. The driver and the knight become friends and quickly fall in love. The knight continues to say he needs to get back to his time, but is torn by the love thing. Also, again, it’s almost Christmas.

Vanessa Hudgens and Josh Whitehouse star.

Read on: Hudgens also starred in a similarly nonsensical Netflix Christmas movie last year. In “The Princess Switch,” Hudgens played a Chicago baker with dreams of grandeur and a princess wanting to experience a more normal life. That’s right, she played two characters who look exactly alike despite never meeting before and then do the classic switcheroo. The script and filming had the similarly unapologetic janky-ness that “The Knight” seems to exhibit. Vulture writer Jackson McHenry wrote a humorous piece called “Everything ‘The Princess Switch’ Taught Me About Chicago” to illustrate how little care the movie had put into crafting Hudgens’ baker character. Here’s one learned thing that, as a Chicagoan, has stuck with me all year:

Chicago is a place where people wear “Chicago” hats.
Early in “The Princess Switch,” Stacey de Novo dons a blue hat with “Chicago” written upon it in cursive pink lettering. Even though this hat does not specify a sports team or other Chicago-related thing, no one mentions that this is a weird thing for someone from the city named on the hat to wear in the city that is named on the hat. Perhaps she is worried she will forget the name of the major metropolitan area in which she lives and need to check the hat for reference.

The Full List Of Movies Joining Netflix

Nov. 19

  • “No hay tiempo para la verguenza” (Netflix Documentary)
  • “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator” (Netflix Documentary)
  • “Dream/Killer”
  • “Lorena, la de pies ligeros” (Netflix Documentary)
  • “The Knight Before Christmas” (Netflix Film)
  • “Mon frère” (Netflix Film)

Nov. 23

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