Not sure what to watch next? or a voyage to the North Pole on Below Deck (though both sound highly entertaining). We’re talking about The Great British Baking Show, which, in recent years, has produced a spinoff episode of its traditional English baking competition every holiday season.
We won’t spoil the ending—we’re not Scrooge!—but it’s not a spoiler to say that all the contestants are neck-in-neck in the very end. That’s how any good competition should be, too. Although The Great British Baking Show failed us this season, with controversies galore, The Great Festive Baking Show is what the holiday season is all about: rekindling relationships with old pals and enjoying spiced biscuits.”
The Great Festive Baking Show.
Netflix
Skip: Strange World
Strange World is s disappointing dose of animated nothingness from Disney. A shame, since it boasts the company’s first (real) gay lead. It’s a strange world, indeed, when a whole movie is dumped into theaters without so much as a plunk.
Here’s Allegra Frank’s take:
“Disney has two movies in theaters right now starring queer characters—but you’d be hard-pressed to name both of them. In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Michaela Coel plays a warrior with a female partner, a relationship given the most cursory of nods toward the end of the movie when the pair calls each other “love.” That feint toward sexual diversity is par for the course with Disney movies these days: sprinkle a little queerness in there for the folks at home, but not too much, so that it can be easily excised for the overseas release. (Either way, bigots are unhappy.)
Strange World.
Disney
Perhaps that’s another intentional choice, meant to shield the film from conservative critique. It toys with a strong environmentalist message toward the end, with a late-state reveal raising questions about ethical consumption of natural resources. The world of Strange World is alive, vibrant, lush, and vast, but the movie’s seemingly well-intentioned humans hardly notice. It’s ironic that the film is similarly ignorant of its gorgeously animated environments; climate change deniers will certainly appreciate how uninterested the script is in engaging with the film’s landscapes, opting for constant quips and explanatory dialogue instead. Less talk about saving the planet, more talk about how awesome dads are!
See: The Eternal Daughter
The Eternal Daughter is the story of a mother and daughter taking a later-in-life vacation together. The twist? They’re both Tilda Swinton. The other twist? Their hotel might be haunted. Seek this emotional stunner out at your local indie theater!
Tilda Swinton in The Eternal Daughter.
Sandro Kopp/Courtesy of A24
Here’s Coleman Spilde’s take:
“Director Joanna Hogg and Tilda Swinton may only be on their third feature film collaboration, but they’re deep into their fifth decade of friendship. Perhaps that’s what makes their newest partnership, The Eternal Daughter, so emotionally resonant—their enduring connection that spans not only life’s great milestones but its minutiae as well.
Their latest partnership comes in the form of this chilling British ghost story from A24, the distributor that has become known (somewhat to its detriment) for bringing smaller-scale, avant-garde horror to the big screen. Whether one would call The Eternal Daughter a proper horror film is at the viewer’s discretion; it certainly doesn’t share many of the elements that we’re used to seeing in a piece of modern horror cinema. But like the most effective entries in the genre, it’s a film that settles itself in the bones for days after, lingering and mutating like a memory.”
Sign up for our See Skip newsletter here to find out which new shows and movies are worth watching, and which aren’t.
