24 Hour Party People

Excellent movie about punk's origins; older teens only.

A light and playful look at the Manchester music scene which spans from the punk explosion to the dawn of acid house.

Brilliantly realised and hilariously funny.

One of the most purely entertaining films about (for want of a better term) pop music in years.

A real party, but it's hard to keep track of the guests.

Director Michael Winterbottom’s sprawling, jagged film is happily, even willfully unreliable as history and it embraces the tug-of-war between factual events and the stories and legends that have around them.

24 Hour Party People takes the same punk approach to storytelling as its subjects did to music, playfully throwing off the dull constraints that often make based-on-a-true-story movies feel like uninspired celluloid translations of a Wikipedia page.

It may not be all true, necessarily, but it's super entertaining, and that's what matters in the end, right?