8-Bit Christmas

In the Chicago suburbs near the end of the 1980s, ten-year-old Jake Doyle wants one thing for Christmas: a Nintendo Entertainment System. His parents refuse, and they are not alone, as a wave of concern about the console has turned many local families against it. Unwilling to accept that answer, Jake takes matters into his own hands, and his efforts to secure the gift soon grow far more complicated than he intended. The story is told by Jake as an adult, looking back on that winter. Michael Dowse directed the film from a screenplay by Kevin Jakubowski; it is the eighth of the ten features Dowse has directed, arriving between Coffee & Kareem and Trap House. Neil Patrick Harris plays the grown Jake and narrates, while Winslow Fegley plays Jake as a child. Steve Zahn and June Diane Raphael appear as his parents, John and Kathy, with Bellaluna Resnick and Sophia Reid-Gantzert as his sisters Lizzy and Annie. The film runs 98 minutes and was released in November 2021. On IMDb it holds a 6.7 rating from around 25,000 votes, and on TMDB a 6.4 from roughly 500 votes; a critics' score of 7 out of 10 from 31 reviews places it slightly above the audience averages on both sites.