Last Christmas

Paul Feig directs from a story by Emma Thompson and Greg Wise and a screenplay by Thompson and Bryony Kimmings. Thompson also plays Kate’s mother Petra, and that double duty explains the balance: a strand about a family who came from Yugoslavia takes as much room as the romance itself. The father Ivan, once a lawyer, now drives a cab; the mother barely leaves the flat. The film sits in London in 2017 and opens with a prologue reaching back to 1999. Everything the closing revelation needs is planted in those first minutes, so a viewer who works it out early spends the rest waiting rather than wondering. The soundtrack runs 14 Wham! and George Michael songs, plus a Michael track cut at AIR Studios between 2012 and 2015 and unreleased until then; it appeared as a single on 6 November 2019 and plays in full over the ending and credits. Shooting used Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street and Covent Garden. Made for 25 to 30 million dollars, it passed 121 million worldwide. A good fit if you want the immigrant family strand given as much time as the couple. Not for someone after a romance that does not load its ending into its first scenes, or anyone who finds a polished tourist London Christmas too bright.