Reclaim Your Lunch Break
7 of the best ‘guilty pleasure’ films to indulge in this autumn
By Stylist Team
Updated 8 years ago
A solo watch of a comforting trashy movie is often what’s required to recharge after a long hard day. So give yourself over to unadulterated (guilty) pleasure and enjoy our seven favourite trashy, soppy or so-bad-they’re-good-films:
1. Cruel Intentions
With glossy sets, amusing dialogue and some truly preposterous acting, this campy teenybopper reworking of Dangerous Liasons also has lashings of racy bits including some Sapphic adventures at a picnic. With some hugely enjoyable late 90s fashion moments including myriad spaghetti straps, pencil-thin eyebrows, mule sandals, brown lipstick and feathered hairdos, it’s the ideal millennial movie night choice.
2. Ghost
Behind every hipster getting into pottery right now surely lies a girl who watched this 1990 romantic-fantasy-thriller starring the late great Patrick ‘Swizzle Hips’ Swayze and queen of the sassiest bowl cut ever, Ms Demi Moore. Apart from the classic pottery/Righteous Brothers moment (which is as amazing on a re-watch as you hoped), there’s murder, ghostliness, intrigue, villainy, Whoopi Goldberg and Swayze singing a song about Henry VIII in a very strange accent. We also want their apartment. Thank you.
3. You’ve Got Mail
Perhaps heralding the beginning of the end of the great wave of 80s and 90s Rom Coms, Nora Ephron’s saccharine sweet comedy, You’ve Got Mail (1998) stars the world’s sweethearts Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as two people living in a magical-looking New York City in a love-hate virtual relationship via something called AOL Instant Messager. If the mere presence of two of the rom com greats doesn’t have you in ecstasy from the opening scene, the constant lo-fi emailing, charming book shop setting, inclusion of Christmas and presence of a dog called Brinkley should do it.
4. The Sound of Music
Raindrops on roses… and whiskers on kittens…. *bursts into song* Yes, The Sound of Music is the ideal film with which to snuggle under the duvet, cast all your cynicism aside and relax (and sing along). Sure, the plot – that a naughty nun becomes a nanny, makes some dresses out of curtains, runs up mountains and falls in love with Christopher Plummer, all while singing about it in a cheerful way is a bit… unusual, but we love it, unreservedly, because it reminds us of being little.
5. Green Card
The plot – that Gerard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell – playing two of the artiest individuals ever invented (a horticulturalist and an avant-garde composer – yuh huh) have to have a fake marriage – is implausible but that just makes this indie-ish romantic immigration drama even better. There’s MacDowell, as ‘Brontë’ (lol), wafting around an amazing greenhouse in a gardening smock; there are language barrier romps aplenty curtesy of Depardieu and there are various baddies in play trying to come in the way of trew luv. Sit back and feel all the feels.
6. Working Girl
Once there was a world, an awful 80s world, where as a woman you had to wear metre high shoulder pads and 10 denier tights to get taken seriously at work, and misogyny and sexual harassment was par for the course. Working Girl gives us a window into all these things as well as some other amazingness. Needless to say the 80s workwear fashion and hair is incredible; Melanie Griffith and her ‘bod’ is delightful and the uplifting ‘you can make it message’ is enlivening. The perfect post-work trash-watch.
7. Notting Hill
What makes this classic 1999 Richard Curtis movie fall on the guilty side of pleasure? It might be the numerous cheesy lines. It might be the presence of Julia Roberts. It might be the presence of Hugh Grant and other assorted affable poshos. Or it might be the presence of Ronan Keating (in the soundtrack). But despite all, this is an enjoyably feel-good wish-fulfilment film featuring West London as a hilariously twinkly, sparkly, friendly place that will warm your cockles.
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