Our year-end movie tear continues, and over the last couple of nights we’ve watched two of my favourites so far:

Attack The Block (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was unlike anything else I’ve seen this year. Ostensibly a silly alien-invasion movie, but made much more interesting by the fact that it’s set in a south London council estate. It took my ears about ten minutes to adjust to where I could understand a damn thing they said, but once I did it was actually quite funny. Think Shaun Of The Dead with kids in a council flat rather than mid-30s suburban slackers (especially since Nick Frost is also in this one).

Submarine (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was about as far from Attack The Block as you could get. I must have watched a hundred coming-of-age / high-school-romance / parents-are-weird films in my life, but few as clever as this. Lots of Wes Anderson influence, though with the weird ramped down a little bit in favour of truly likeable characters. The actors were all great, including a barely-recognizable Paddy Considine, but especially leads Craig Roberts (our protagonist) and Yasmin Paige (with whom teenager-me would probably have been madly in love).