What to Watch This Week (11-17 Jul)

Best new film in cinemas: Ghostbusters

When it was announced two years ago that Paul Feig, the writer-director behind kickass, female-led comedies like Bridesmaids and The Heat, would be rebooting an all-female Ghostbusters, a large section of the internet lost its shit. Thousands of tweets were fired off in outrage, most beginning “I’m not sexist… but.”

When the first trailer emerged earlier this year, it became the most disliked in YouTube’s history – that video of a woman putting a cat in a wheelie bin got fewer angry comments. Even Ernie Hudson, who played Winston Zeddemore in the 1984 original, got in on the action, pre-empting the casting choice in an ill-advised interview back in 2014: “I hope that if they go that way at least they'll be funny, and if they're not funny at least hopefully it'll be sexy. 

"I love the idea of including women, I think that's great. But all-female? I think it would be a bad idea. I don't think the fans want to see that.” Oh Ernie.

Good news is, the film is ace. “This new Ghostbusters is finally here and it’s a resounding success, not only demonstrating that women are just as good as men at catching ghosts, but also that Paul Feig is one of mainstream cinema’s most important filmmaking talents,” wrote our reviewer Patrick Gamble. The cast (Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon) are reportedly matches for Bill Murray et al, while bringing their own unique personalities to the material.

Head out and support the film at cinemas this week; not only does it look like you’re in for a good time, you can also laugh at the fanboys as they stumble down the aisle at the closing credits staring at their smart phones blankly as they try and come up with reasons to hate what they just saw.

Released by Sony on 11 Jul – read our review

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Best new film at home: Highlander 30th Anniversary Edition

Highlander is looking in surprisingly good nick three decades on from its less than inspiring release in 1986. “The US release was a disaster,” director Russell Mulcahy recently told the Guardian. “It had one of the worst posters ever: a black and white close-up of [star] Christopher [Lambert]. It looked like he had acne. You thought: ‘What the fuck’s this about?’”

We suspect the few punters who did go see it were probably asking themselves the same question. This batshit-daft tale of immortals doing battle through the ages doesn’t have much internal logic, but who cares when it looks like an 80s Prince video cut-and-shut with a salty period drama set in 14th century Scotland? Mulcahy papers over many of the script's shortcomings with striking comic panel-like framing and expressive camera flourishes.

The famously oddball casting, meanwhile, has proved strangely endearing. Despite his Eurotrash accent, Lambert is surprisingly moving as immortal Scottish warrior Connor MacLeod, his gallic moodiness apt for a man trapped in time, while Sean Connery brings gravitas as MacLeod’s Egyptian mentor, who teaches him the immortal ropes. Best of all is Clancy Brown, who’s brilliantly deranged as the film’s steampunk antagonist the Kurgan. It shouldn’t all work, but the neon-lit madness still hangs together all these years on. Ignore the awful sequels, there can be only one.

Released on DVD and Blu-ray by StudioCanal on 11 Jul – read our interview with Clancy Brown

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Best new series streaming: Fargo, season two

Did the world want a belated TV show based on the Coen Brothers’ near perfect neo-noir Fargo? No. But now that we have one, we’re delighted.

The series channels the coal black humour and skew-whiff atmosphere of that classic, setting it in the same snow-covered Minnesota milieu that felt so bracingly exotic back in 1996, the cutesy politeness of the local yokels pleasantly juxtaposed with the bleak morality and violent machinations of the antagonists. Fargo series one, set in 2006, followed tenacious cop Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) as she investigated the murder of the town sheriff and a local woman, suspecting the woman’s shifty sales insurance husband (Martin Freeman) of the shooting.

Series two, set in 1979, concerns a case investigated by Molly’s father Lou (played here by Patrick Wilson and in season one by Keith Carradine). This time around, action is propelled by an ordinary young couple, dim butcher Ed (Jesse Plemons) and tough hairdresser Peggy (Kirsten Dunst), and what happens when their life collides with a big crime family from the nearby town of Fargo. In the US, this second series topped many TV critics' end-of-year lists, with most declaring it superior to the first. Get ready to binge.

Fargo season two comes to Netflix on 13 Jul

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Best movies on UK TV: Melissa McCarthy Triple Bill on Film4

Cannily timed to tie in with the release of Ghostbusters, Film4 are charting the meteoric rise of comedy bulldozer Melissa McCarthy, who’s currently duking it out with fellow ghostbuster Kristin Wiig for the title of funniest actor in Hollywood. Until five years ago, McCarthy was barely on the comedy radar. She was a regular on US television series Gilmore Girls and one half of little-loved sitcom Mike & Molly.

Her Oscar-nominated turn in 2011's Bridesmaids, however, turned the world on to her comic genius. “When it works, it works like jazz,” says Paul Feig – who directed McCarthy in Bridesmaids, The Heat and Spy – of the 45-year-old's improv skills. “I can’t get enough of it. Sometimes she’ll go to say something terrible and then she’ll stop and she’ll say, ‘I can’t say that.’ I say, ‘You have to, because whatever comes out of your mouth, I know it’s going to be the finest goddamn thing.’”

The three films on Film4’s season are Bridesmaids, Identity Theft and The Heat. In each one, McCarthy is a foul-mouthed riot.

Film4's Melissa McCarthy Triple Bill: Bridesmaids (12 Jul, 9pm), Identity Theft (13 Jul, 9pm) and The Heat (14 Jul, 9pm).