Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 11 December

Attack the Block (Cornish, 2011)

I’ve been wait­ing for this one to turn up loc­ally as it is an under­seen clas­sic – and intro­duced the world to the force of nature that is John Boyega.

I reviewed it when it was released in New Zealand back in 2012:

It has taken ten months for Joe Cornish’s bril­liant Attack the Block to make its way to New Zealand and one of the first ques­tions will be, is there still an audi­ence left for it con­sid­er­ing the most rabid fans will have found – licit and illi­cit – ways to watch it months ago. I cer­tainly hope there is because Cornish has pro­duced a highly ori­gin­al take on a clas­sic genre – a low-budget ali­en inva­sion movie that is thrill­ing, funny and socially aware.

It’s Guy Fawke’s Night and the attemp­ted mug­ging of off-duty nurse Sam (Jodie Whittaker) is inter­rup­ted by a the explos­ive arrival of a strange creature. The lead­er of the young hood­lums, Moses (a star-making per­form­ance by John Boyega), man­ages to kill the beast and they take the car­cass as a trophy, not real­ising that there are oth­ers fol­low­ing – and that they will want revenge.

Attack the Block deliv­ers some astute social com­ment between the thrills. Moses believes that the mon­sters have been sent by the gov­ern­ment to kill more black people – because the drugs and guns aren’t doing it fast enough – and his hero­ism is destined to go unre­cog­nised in an inner city Britain where work­ing class black youth are only ever por­trayed one way.

The mon­sters are of the extremely low budget men-in-hairy-suits vari­ety but the edit­ing (by Scott Pilgrim’s Jonathan Amos) keeps them mostly out of sight for the first act after which they become extremely fast-moving and occa­sion­ally ter­ri­fy­ing. But it’s the char­ac­ter aspect of Attack the Block that will stay with me – a mis­un­der­stood gen­er­a­tion turn­ing the tables on pre­ju­dice as well as an ali­en threat.

Also in that Capital Times column: the “intol­er­ably pat­ron­ising” The Women on the 6^th Floor, bril­liant The Lorax (destined for a recom­mend­a­tion here at some point), Julia Roberts in Mirror, Mirror (“noth­ing sizzles”) and Wrath of the Titans (which I didn’t appear to hate).

Where to watch Attack the Block

Aotearoa: Streaming on Māori+ (free with ads)

Australia: Streaming on Stan

Canada: Streaming on HollywoodSuite

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Netflix and Prime

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Max

Follow-up

Yesterday, I sug­ges­ted I would try and list all of the films that have shown up in major inter­na­tion­al out­lets’ Best of 2024 but haven’t been released in New Zealand yet (and are not on the sched­ule). TL:DR – It’s a lot, which means I have to park that pro­ject for a little bit. Too close to showtime!