Every Christmas brings its own set of annual rituals: boosting Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” to the top of the charts, watching videos of people stampeding for cheap TVs on Black Friday, wondering exactly how you bake those peanut butter cookies with the Hershey’s Kiss in the middle without melting it as if it is a feat of modern alchemy. But in the past 10 years or so there is also a new ritual that sprouts up on the internet: the Love Actually discourse.

Some people love it, some people hate it, but every festive season, as sure as egg nog will pop up in your grocer’s refrigerator section, someone will have something to say about Richard Curtis’s 2003 gingerbread-flavored rom-com (even though English people don’t do gingerbread, but you get what I’m going for here). Well, we no longer have to debate if this movie is good or bad, problematic or maligned, cancelled or a classic. I am here to make sense of both sides and give you the final verdict.

The movie shows nine different love stories in modern London with characters overlapping in different versions of schmaltz. Many of the characters make grand declarations of love or finally pull the trigger on making themselves known to a long-standing crush, like Laura Linney who finally has to tell her hot-as-hell coworker Rodrigo Santoro that she fancies his pants off. Some of them end badly and even the ones that end happily sort of end badly in that, well, they probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place.