A decade and a half on from his last completed feature, Bruce Robinson is to make an overdue return to the director's chair with Hunter S Thompson adap The Rum Diary. Try as he might, though, he'll never top his seminal 1987 debut, a semi-autobiographical romp through his booze-fuelled youth that needs no excuse to be seen again and again. Will Richard E Grant ever get a better role than bitter thespian Withnail? Has anyone devised a more iconic comic notion than the Camberwell Carrot? Has any screenplay combined so many quotable lines with such tear-jerking pathos or blatant homophobia? Watch this digital re-release and thank the lords above the recently mooted stage version with Jude Law as Withnail was nothing more than an opportunistic producer's pipe dream.
