Even if the Bittersweet And Very British Emma Thompson Holiday Movie you watch religiously every year is the other one ( Peter’s Friends), and Last Christmas has fewer memorably meme-able moments, there’s a lot in this movie to like if not love, actually. More A Christmas Carol than a Christmas rom-com (but just as corny), the London setting will invite comparisons to other critically panned but popularly beloved, now-classic contemporary Christmas movies. Photo Credit: Jonathan Prime/Uni/Universal Picturesīut not before she starts volunteering at the local shelter where Tom apparently works and becomes grateful that, unlike so many others, she has a home to go back to. Naturally, this is when he starts ghosting her.Ĭlarke is enormously charismatic in the film's lead role. She clearly hasn’t noticed that Golding’s Tom is peculiarly blank and guileless or that he seems to have just the one Uniqlo outfit, and she figures they must be soulmates.
She initially shoos him away, but after a series of so-charming quirky excursions, like a dead-of-night ice-skating lesson and a secret garden walk, she decides he’s a Christmas prince charming. At first he’s just a friendly guy who hits on her at Yuletide Wonderful, the holiday shop where she works year-round (attired as an elf).
New friend Tom (Henry Golding) helps Kate out of her funk. (Clarke, however, is so radiantly charismatic that you can understand why they all forgive her.) A recent illness has put her in a tailspin, and she’s estranged from her family, so she couch-surfs with friends and hook-ups until her dissolute ways finally alienate them all.
Katarina is now aspiring actress Kate (Emilia Clarke), who doesn’t earn enough in her retail job to have an apartment. It picks up again in London during the first Christmas season after the Brexit referendum, Katarina and her family having since fled the Balkans. The movie opens in the former Yugoslavia in 1999, where young Katarina leads a choral arrangement of George Michael’s Heal the Pain. Reviews of films opening this week: Martin Scorsese’s gift The Irishman, and the familiar and formulaic holiday tale Last Christmas Although arguably, the most inspired musical cue isn’t even from Michael – it’s Roland Gift’s refrain of She Drives Me Crazy, our heroine’s custom ringtone for her overbearing mother. Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go after oversleeping, Faith for the restored-confidence scene and Freedom for the redemption montage. Last Christmas does little to upend holiday-movie conventions – instead, everything on the turkey-season wish list is here, including a showdown at a family meal.īased on a story by Emma Thompson and husband Greg Wise and directed by Paul Feig ( Spy, Bridesmaids), Last Christmas is a jukebox-musical holiday movie that’s named for (and loosely plotted around) one of the George Michael hits it deploys in key moments – sometimes instead of emotional texture, sometimes as punchline. And sometimes you involuntarily tear up because that’s on the menu. Sometimes a movie invites you into an emotional journey and you come out of the theatre changed.