The Village Screen/ The Breakfast Club & Jurassic Park at Victoria Baths
Tom Grieve, Cinema EditorVictoria Baths regulars The Village Screen are back this summer as they pop-up to transform Manchester’s much loved Victorian swimming pool into a classy cinema space once again. Previous attendees will know what to expect: crowd pleasing blockbusters and cult favourites, delivered alongside fantastic street food, moody lighting, pumping tunes, and, of course, a bar. It’s a formula that works, and the Village Screen’s events make for a perfect movie-date-night with a twist, or a great place to catch a nostalgic classic with a group of mates.
Composed of two screenings across Friday 9th and Saturday 10th August, the summer screenings kick off with John Hughes’ bona-fide vintage high-school flick, The Breakfast Club. Brains, athletes, princesses, criminals and basket cases should all find something to relate to here. Starring Brat Packers Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson and, of course, Molly Ringwald, Hughes’ 1985 film gathers its disparate characters for a Saturday morning detention in which they learn that they’re not so different from one another after all.
Saturday’s film is nineties-kid canon fodder, Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum is currently undergoing the kind of cult-y memeification previously inflicted upon Bill Murray, but audiences can remember just what makes the idiosyncratic actor so special in Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 tale of science gone too far. A modern master, Spielberg is a master of tension and Goldblum is joined by the always excellent Laura Dern and Sam Neill as dinosaurs run amok on the island of Isla Nublar. Lesser sequels may have dented the novelty, but we can’t wait to hear those raptors echoing around Victoria Baths.