Critical Week: Almost paradise

It's the final week of the year, and I'm enjoying the relative silence of my email inbox these days. I'm using this time to catch up on missed movies for my year-end best/worst lists (coming very soon!). And I've also been watching some mindless television and eating rather too much, as you're supposed to do at this time of year. Of course, some of these movies are coming out over the holidays, or soon thereafter. This includes Los Frikis, a beautifully made true drama from filmmakers Michael Schwartz and Tyler Nilson (The Peanut Butter Falcon) about a group of young Cubans in the early 1990s who made audacious choices to survive and created a rock-n-roll paradise in the process.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
A Complete Unknown
Nosferatu • Better Man
Vengeance Most Fowl • 2073
The Order • Los Frikis
ALL REVIEWS >

Kerry Washington stars in the inspirational true drama The Six Triple Eight, about a platoon of Black women who solved an insurmountable problem during WWII. It's over-egged by filmmaker Tyler Perry, but the story is great. Looney Tunes returns to the big screen with Daffy Duck and Porky Pig in The Day the Earth Blew Up, a rather too-silly apocalyptic animated slapstick comedy that only has moments of genuine charm. Asif Kapadia's offbeat documentary 2073 is very pointed, but is packed with urgent reporting about the state of the planet right now. And from Thailand, How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is a charming, very sentimental comedy about a teen who learns some important lessons while caring for his feisty, dying grandmother.

This coming week I'll be catching up on a few more year-end titles, including the epic musical The End and the acclaimed documentaries Sugarcane and Grand Theft Hamlet. Press screenings won't start up again until 7th January.