Last Christmas

[zico]

5/10. Fuzzy, warm feelgood rom-com Christmas movie with a clever twist, starring Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons a.k.a. Emilia Clarke.

You really have to like both Emilia Clarke and Wham to fully enjoy this movie, as it contains plenty of both, but it's bearable even if you don't like either. The film soundtrack is actually set around Wham's Last Christmas album (including the duff songs unfortunately) and starts Emilia Clarke as a dizzy, loveable/annoying/irritating/pathetic young Londoner messing about with her life.
Pedant point - film's first scene says it's set in "Yugoslavia 1998" which didn't exist then, but presumably they didn't want to identify a particular war-torn former Yugoslavian country.

The first half has lots of fairly gentle, often lazy/contrived humour with unlikely stereotypes (e.g. Emma Thompson as a depressive Balkan mum) which gets a bit tedious, and the main entertainment is derived from guessing the London locations. But then there's a twist that I absolutely didn't see coming (and neither did Mrs.Zico who's usually streets ahead of me in spotting twists) and the particularly clever bit is that the twist is hiding in plain sight. You'll either kick yourself for missing it, or think "well it was obvious from early on".

There's a nice warm Christmassy feel to the movie, and with its message of "let's be nice to each other" its heart is in the right place.