“Christmas is this blank canvas, and everybody uses it to work out their feelings of family and hope and nostalgia.”

Justin’s rating: Six out of seven fishes breaded and fried

Justin’s review: In my mind, Culty Christmas doesn’t exist just to rag on the low-hanging fruit of bad Christmas movies and specials. I mean, it can be part of it, but constant mockery is tacky. Culty Christmas should also be about searching for other great little holiday gems that we can enjoy just as much as the staples we trot out every December.

In that spirit, this year I took a few suggestions from various lists recommending underrated Christmas flicks and decided to start with Feast of the Seven Fishes. I’d never heard of this, nor would even assume that it’s a Christmas movie from that title (despite being Italian myself).

It’s Christmas 1983 in coal country West Virginia, and an Italian young adult named Tony just got accepted to an art school that he can’t afford. At a party, he meets a girl named Beth who’s home from college and forms a connection. But their budding romance is put to the test as Beth comes over to Tony’s family celebration — the Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes — and his mess of an ex-girlfriend Katie shows up really wanting him back.

The movie is a slow burn of their relationship: Seeing what makes them attracted to each other, what they each value, and how they might be able to overcome the obstacles that are popping up almost from the start.

For Gen Xers especially, this movie’s going to be a whole lot of “remember when?” moments. Remember when mom used to yell throughout the house that someone had a telephone call? Remember camcorders? Remember when interior decoration was more earth tones than anything else? Remember when your grandma would write all her recipes in cursive on index cards?

There’s a warm, nostalgic glow that flows through this film that’s part Christmas and part early ’80s. Not Hollywood ’80s but shades of how it really was. The writer of this film, Robert Tinnell, based this on his own hometown in West Virginia, and he does a spectacular job getting all of the little period details right as well as the feel of a Christmas hang.

Feast of the Seven Fishes is, at heart, an indie film that wants you to get to know its characters, and the way that’s going to happen is through a whole lot of conversations. Throughout this movie, we get to know a good slice of the townsfolk, and that’s a good thing — they’re a generally likable crew with a rapport and history that’s revealed in those talks.

Tony is thoughtful, gentle, and deeply caring, which makes for a good match with the soul-searching Beth. There’s Joe Pantoliano as a standout bit part as Uncle Frank (who may or may not be in the mafia), as well as the hex-spewing Nonnie (the matriarch of the family).

Katie should get a mention as Tony’s ex, who in most other movies would be a mere one-note speed bump to his happiness. Here, she’s actually a real person who’s grieving their breakup (she still sleeps with his varsity jacket) and the fact that it means that Tony’s family no longer accepts her into their circle the way they used to. Tony’s moved on, she hasn’t, and that stinks.

But by far, my favorite character here is Juke, the strange but sage bar fly who sees plenty and flings out low-key zingers all over the place. He’s a Force that affects those around him, even as he’s halting and awkward and weird. We need more characters like Juke in our movies.

So yeah, I liked these people and liked this film. Really. It’s not an instant modern classic or anything, but it’s a Christmas movie with a heart, a few deep belly laughs, and far more effort put into it than most of anything we see in theaters or Hallmark this month. Plus, it made me really hungry for fish, which is not a sentence that I thought I’d be writing today.