T2 Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 2017)

This long-awaited sequel to the iconic Trainspotting was by no means inevitable due to differences between the director and cast, even if Irvine Welsh had already penned the literary follow-up years before. But thank God it's finally here, and more importantly that it proves worthwhile.
It's now twenty years later, with McGregor's Renton, still clean, turning up in Edinburgh again to track down his former friends, finding poor old Spud still struggling with addiction and the calculating Sick Boy planning to start up a brothel. Meanwhile, Carlyle's sociopathic Begbie has been in prison for the whole intervening period and his fury at Renton's betrayal so long ago has only festered instead of abating. The tension really gets racked up when he escapes and then finds out that Renton is back again.
It would be impossible to reproduce the anarchic freshness of the original film, and Boyle is well aware of this: there are several metalevels in how the characters mull over a past they can't recapture, varyingly seeing parts of it through rose-tinted glasses and others through regret. In the words of Sick Boy, Renton has become a tourist to his own youth, but so are they all. It manages to be affectingly elegiac and still give room for moments of innocent, open hilarity. And the updated techno-centric soundtrack is a stonker too, smoothly complementary in its references to the original one. It's a wonderful, emotive return and when it had to be pointed out to me afterwards how many plotholes there actually were (most notably, Begbie hiding out after his jailbreak in, er, his own house), I found for once that I didn't really care.

8/10