Metacritic reviews

Sweetly funny and relatable, Happy Christmas builds on the director's previous work by channeling its strong aspects — naturalism and self-effacing, true-to-life humor — into a relatively straightforward but utterly enjoyable character study.

Swanberg isn’t doing anything new with Happy Christmas, but sticking to the same non-formula formula this time around yields unprecedentedly inspired results.

Swanberg’s most mature and satisfying film yet.

The film does possess ample charms and insights, though admittedly, they do take quite a long time to coalesce.

That doesn’t stop the movie as a whole from feeling a little slight, though, like a Christmas tree that isn’t entirely filled out.

Happy Christmas, which is set around Christmas, shares several plot and thematic points with “Neighbors,” but without the aggression or belly laughs.

Swanberg's modest script lays out some fairly mundane domestic situations, which the actors elevate with a collaborative style characterized by gentle humor and authentic, frequently overlapping dialogue.

Joe Swanberg's follow-up to Drinking Buddies is short and slight, but undeniably charming.

Nobody involved ever came up with an idea or character remotely worth exploring, yet they all forged ahead anyway, placing their faith in the filmmaking process itself, and this damp squib of an ostensible movie is the decidedly lackluster result.

Happy Christmas desperately needs some real jokes, rather than settling for the bemused chuckles that accompany its banal observations into human nature.