Streaming: the best films about drinking

I’ve never been a subscriber to dry January: the month, with its stern back-to-business vibe and doubled-down winter chill, seems austere enough to me already. Yet whether you participate in the no-drinking game or not, January has become the month that compels us to consider our relationship to alcohol, how much space it takes in our lives, and what else can fill it.

Alcoholism is a condition the movies have always treated with varying levels of intensity – it’s somehow the addiction you’re allowed to make a comedy about – though the sober-minded, cautionary drinking drama has forever been a Hollywood mainstay. Nearly 80 years ago, Billy Wilder took a clutch of Oscars for The Lost Weekend, a then shocking, still potent portrait of an alcoholic New York writer (gutsily played by Ray Milland) on a bender that could prove fatal, if not for the love and intervention of a good woman. Exactly half a century later, Nicolas Cage won an Oscar for a more bleakly fatalistic version of a similar story in Leaving Las Vegas. As a suicidal screenwriter (it’s a rule of film storytelling that writers can never be happy) who heads to Sin City with the express intention of drinking himself to death, Cage’s bruised performance lends this awful mission a kind of dignity, matched by Elisabeth Shue as the sex worker who accepts him without seeking to save him.

In 1962, Days of Wine and Roses sounded a warning to couples who have more fun together after a drink or two. The generally lovable Jack Lemmon showed a more tortured side as a PR exec pulling Lee Remick’s high-class teetotaller into a martini-fuelled void. As an alcoholic marital study, it’s effective, though it lacks the amoral, no-holds-barred punch of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a few years later. As a senior university couple driven by drink to shared tragedy and mutual hatred, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton surely scared many into sobriety.

In the mid-1990s, When a Man Loves a Woman unusually showed the strain placed on a seemingly golden marriage by a woman’s drinking habit. Meg Ryan’s go-for-broke performance scratches away her America’s sweetheart surface and powers past the film’s slightly soapy gloss. As a hard-partying journalist (there it is again) finding her best self in rehab, Sandra Bullock aimed for similarly against-type impact in 28 Days. She’s good, but the film makes recovery look awfully peppy. Redemption is far harder to come by in Italian film-maker Ermanno Olmi’s magnificent The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988), in which a homeless drunkard is given money to mend his life, if he could just stop spending it on booze. It lays out the tragedy of alcoholism in the form of a fable.

Not all films about alcohol have to be solemn, however. Thomas Vinterberg’s 2021 Oscar winner Another Round, in which a group of schoolteachers test the effects of day drinking, struck a fine, tricky balance between examining alcohol’s ruinous possibilities and its exhilarating rewards, culminating in a tipsy, life-enhancing dance. There’s more sloshed male bonding in Alexander Payne’s Sideways. Its wine-related metaphors for life’s true rewards are a bit hokey, but it’s a pleasantly laid-back drinking study – a cosy California counterpart to the drizzly British hedonism of Withnail and I, still a hilarious celebration of appalling habits. Or the rougher Americana of the fascinating hybrid documentary Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, a tattered, red-cheeked valentine to dive-bar culture and community.

The 1949 Ealing comedy Whisky Galore! is the most purely ebullient film about alcohol – one in which a surprise bounty of the amber firewater becomes a veritable life force for an island population amid wartime rations. And drinking – of soju in particular – is a staple pleasure, building both character and conversation, in the films of prolific South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo, too few of which are streamable. His lovely In Front of Your Face (2021) pivots on the free, drunken revelation of a pained secret to a stranger. But it’s the 1950 James Stewart vehicle Harvey that stands out for its atypically laissez-faire approach to a character’s alcoholism. Stewart’s hero is sympathetically presented as a contented barfly, his drinking buddy an imaginary human-sized rabbit, all deemed preferable to life as “a perfectly normal human being”. Cheers to that.

All titles available to rent on multiple platforms unless specified.

New to stream this week

How to Have Sex
(Mubi)
Now available to stream on Mubi, British writer-director Molly Manning Walker’s Cannes-laurelled debut comes as a fluorescent shot of summer heat amid the January drear. Not that it’s all holiday fun and games in this sharply observed, vivaciously performed and gradually chilling portrait of sexual boundaries tested and violated on a wild girls’ trip to Malia in Crete.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
An altogether more healing study of female bonding, Anna Hints’s wonderful documentary kicks back with a group of women at a traditional Estonian sauna facility in the woods. Focusing not on faces or bodies – shown in intimate but respectful fragments – but on a collective spirit of physical and emotional release, the film listens with a keen ear as whole life stories emerge from the steam.

The Exorcist: Believer
Once the crown prince of American indie lyricism, director David Gordon Green continues his mystifying turn towards horror franchise exploitation in this tepid return to the daddy of all demonic-possession movies – given only a semblance of legacy prestige by the presence of original stars Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair in the cast.