POP UP CINEMA BRIGHTON

Join us for VHS Fest, a special film festival celebrating films that represent the classic era of VHS video.  Each night you can take a stroll through our life size VHS rental store, indulge in some retro gaming, have a drink in our beer garden (with our VHS era playlist) and then enjoy a cult classic film from the era on the big screen. 

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Hot on the heels of two breakthrough performances in Tony Scott's Top Gun and Scorsese's The Color of Money, and right before what is likely the most unprecedented unbroken run of successful (either financially or critically) movies in cinema history that would last until present day, Cruise graced this popcorn classic with the presence of mega-star. Transforming what was essentially a b-movie into a box office smash that would take in nearly nine times it's own budget at the box office. 

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When young Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise) is discharged from the army he dreams of making it big in business in New York City, despite taking the right classes and applying for the right jobs he is repeatedly rejected until in desperation he stumbles upon veteran bartender Doug Coughlin (an unforgettable Bryan Brown) and accepts a job in order to make ends meet. Eventually hatching a scheme to start his own bar by making in money bartending in Jamaica he falls into a whirlwind romance with an American artist Jordan Mooney (Elisabeth Shue) holidaying at the resort as darker storm clouds begin to gather over his life, love and dreams. 

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A movie that created an entire generation of bartenders, Cocktail is a flashy, funny and sometimes dark comic book coming of age fantasy that reflects the changing tides of the era. A fascinating study of how the charm of the yuppie dream was beginning to fade, Tom Cruise plays it braggadocious and cocky before craftily deploying his trademark earnestness.

 

Despite it's dark interior the fabulously thin plot allows for the full popcorn movie guilty pleasure experience of breezy romance movie about an ambitious bartender in 80s America and was undoubtedly a staple of the VHS era with its vibrant fashions, soundtrack, quotable dialogue and undeniably charismatic central star. We can't wait to visit with the current undisputed (as of 2025) king of the box office and all round champion of cinema in his 1988 guise in what is probably the most VHS centric release of his career. An epic way to end three nights of VHS Fest.