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Featuring Francesca Scorsese (daughter of Martin) and Sawyer Spielberg (son of Steven), it’s hard not to go into Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point with curiosity piqued as to what the next generation might have helped to create, beside the point though that might be. Happily, Taormina’s atmospheric film turns out to be a rich slice of retro-styled Americana, replete with the classic movie flourishes of their forebears, from the distant wails of an Amtrak horn, to the precarious picket-fence perfection of a dime-a-dozen suburb.

The set-up is simple. Several generations of the Italian-American Balsano family are heading back to matriarch Antonia’s (Mary Reistetter) home on Long Island to break bread together across one long, eggnog-soaked Christmas Eve. While nominally sharing in the festivities, though, each subset has its own priorities: the little kids, never far from a fractious meltdown, are all about the...

Every conceivable trope and tonal variant of a Christmas movie appears to be accounted for in Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. There’s a boisterous family gathering, where characters bask in nostalgia. Romances and rivalries abound. Grievances are aired. There’s physical comedy and a crisis that could alter the nature of Christmases to come. Oddball family members who could fit comfortably in a movie as broadly drawn as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation mingle freely with those more subtly and melancholically rendered, who might fit in among the atmosphere of Sofia Coppola’s sad and lovely A Very Murray Christmas.

In Taormina’s Ham on Rye, a dance stood in for all coming-of-age rituals in a blend of past and present America. In Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, holiday tropes born of life and movies alike are exaggerated, parodied, celebrated, and compressed to suggest...