Pick of the week
Brats
There’s real tension in Pretty in Pink star Andrew McCarthy’s documentary: his discomfort with the “Brat Pack” label applied to the likes of him, Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald and other hip Hollywood gunslingers versus the fact there was actually something significant happening in this batch of mainstream but emotionally raw films (St Elmo’s Fire, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club etc) that deserved labelling. The group therapy aspect of this reunion suggests that McCarthy doesn’t think the ship has sailed on the question of whether the label was a fair one. If you couldn’t care less, there are ample Hollywood war stories and 80s nostalgia here to sate most John Hughes heads.
Friday 5 July, Disney+
***
Anyone But You
The couple-who-detest-each-other turnaround is the taproot of the romcom, beginning with 1934’s It Happened One Night. But that’s nothing two red-hot stars – Sydney Sweeney as a fretful law student, Glen Powell as a douchebag banker – and a porny veneer can’t freshen up. Its recent long-staying box office run, to the tune of $220m, has raised a little (possibly optimistic) hope for the beleaguered genre. But as the pert pair hover in each other’s orbit after their disastrous first date, this is a breezy and bolshie watch that’s undeniably easy on the eye.
Friday 5 July, 10.45am; 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
Taxi Driver
The film that launched a thousand student posters, Martin Scorsese’s 1976 neo-noir portrait of a fallen New York remains horribly relevant. Travis Bickle’s alienated self-pity might stem from the Vietnam era, but it’s also reminiscent of modern “incels”, as well as the culture of nation-purifying extremism rife in the US now. Shot with urban-fox impressionism and of course led by Robert De Niro’s shocking implosion of a performance, everyone brought their A-game here. An endlessly rewarding dissection of the American soul.
Saturday 29 June, 10pm, Great! Movies
***
LaRoy, Texas
The Coen brothers are the obvious inspiration for this entertaining pileup of missing suitcases, sad-sack husbands, strippers and semi-competent detectives. Debut director Shane Atkinson hasn’t quite mastered the Coens’ tonal dexterity, but his crime thriller – in which said cuckolded spouse (John Magaro) teams up with a stetsoned PI (Steve Zahn) to find missing loot – has a compulsive hyperactivity. Playing the Anton Chigurh-like hitman also on the trail, it’s a great reminder of the underused screen presence that is Dylan Baker.
Sunday 30 June, noon; 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
The Lincoln Lawyer
In the film that marked the start of the fabled “McConnaissance”, Matthew McConaughey moved up a gear from his romcom stomping ground to play peripatetic Los Angeles attorney Mickey Haller, who works out of his Lincoln Continental car. Generally a legal-system bottom-feeder, he is caught in a conspiracy after he agrees to defend Ryan Philippe’s playboy for supposedly killing a sex worker. Hard-boiled and satisfying, it benefits hugely from McConaughey’s quick-talking savvy and the innate charisma he seemed to have misplaced.
Sunday 30 June, 1.40am, Film4
***
Brighton Rock
Still the best film adaptation of a Graham Greene novel. A 25-year-old Richard Attenborough is on lacerating form as gangster Pinkie Brown, trying to cover up a murder in the gaudy seaside resort that, in Greene’s hands, becomes a postlapsarian nightmare stewing in fleeting pleasures and Catholic damnation. The jury is still out on whether the new “happy” ending concocted by Greene to dodge the censors is a cop-out, or even more cynical than the novel itself.
Tuesday 2 July, 2.20pm, Talking Pictures TV
***
The Imaginary
This lavish fantasy has a Pixar-ish conceit: all children have imaginary friends who are reunited in a parallel world when their significant kids (in this case the bookshop-dwelling Amanda) forget them. But the story is given the full anime treatment by recent Ghibli splinter outfit Studio Ponoc, with Miyazaki collaborator Yoshiyuki Momose bringing the extra wildness that characterises Japanese fantasy, an artisanal richness to the visuals, and – in the shape of sinister villain Mr Bunting and minions – a light dose of J-horror chills.
Friday 5 July, Netflix
• This article was amended on 29 June 2024. In an earlier version, a picture caption misidentified John Leguizamo as Michael Peña.
