The Dog Stars to One Night Only: 10 of the best films to watch this August

From Jacob Elordi in Ridley Scott's post-apocalyptic thriller, to a wacky NYC romcom starring Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro, here are the films to watch at the cinema and stream at home this month.

In most ways, One Night Only is a typical romantic comedy. It revolves around two flirtatious and absurdly attractive young New Yorkers (Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner), and it's directed by Will Gluck, who made such Hollywood romcoms as Friends with Benefits and Anyone but You. But Travis Braun's script has a bizarre twist: it's set in an alternate reality where it's illegal for single people to have sex, except on one night a year. Nicknamed "The Purge, but for sex", the concept has prompted much online debate about whether it's a great idea for a romcom or an absolutely terrible one. "If you allow yourself to buy into the absurdity of it, you'll have a good time," advised Turner in The Hollywood Reporter. "Don't be a stickler for the rules, or go watch something else. Go watch a documentary."

Released on 7 August in the US and Canada and on 28 August in the UK and Ireland

Eli Roth, the director of Cabin Fever and Hostel, is back to dish out another scoop of gory, low-budget horror – and Ice Cream Man looks like his most gleefully excessive film yet. Ari Millen plays the titular purveyor of frozen treats, a mystery man who drives around an all-American town, selling ice cream that turns children into homicidal maniacs. So if you enjoyed the climax of Weapons, when the children become a pack of feral predators, then Ice Cream Man could be the guilty pleasure for you. "I want this to be the craziest film I've ever made," said Roth in Geek Vibes Nation. It's like The Birds but with children... I mean, it's totally insane."

Released on 6 August in Australia and New Zealand, and on 7 August in the US, the UK, Canada and Ireland

Ridley Scott is 88, but the legendary director is busier than ever. In the past five years, he has made The Last Duel, House of Gucci, Napoleon and Gladiator II, and now he's directed The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic thriller adapted from Peter Heller's novel. Among the survivors of a near-future flu epidemic are a pilot (Jacob Elordi), a medic (Margaret Qualley) and an ex-marine (Josh Brolin) – although you could say that none of them knows more about surviving than Scott himself. "He's been plugging into cinema his whole life – it literally pumps through his blood," said Elordi on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. "That's what keeps the engine running. I'm literally watching cinema sustain a life."

Released on 26 to 28 August internationally

Anthony Bourdain, who died in 2018, was a rock star in the world of food and travel-writing, so it's appropriate that he should get a rock star origin-story film. Inspired by his bestselling memoir, Kitchen Confidential, Tony is set in the mid-1970s when he was a college drop-out working in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It's directed by Matt Johnson (Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie), and it features Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) as the 19-year-old Bourdain, alongside Antonio Banderas as the chef who mentors him, Leo Woodall as a friend, and Emilia Jones as his girlfriend. Sessa is the ideal actor to play Bourdain, Johnson said in Entertainment Weekly. "[They are] both from Jersey, both sent to private school, but didn't fit in, both restless and searching… More than any movie I've ever made, this film was a partnership with an actor."

Released on 7 August in the US, and on 14 August in the UK and Ireland

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma was the best reviewed film at this year's Cannes Film Festival. A surreal postmodern comedy from Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), it stars Hannah Einbinder (Hacks) as a queer director who is hired to revive a Friday-the-13th-like slasher franchise – and to make it politically acceptable to liberal young viewers. Her big idea is to hire the actress (Gillian Anderson) who was the star of the first film. But it so happens that the actress now lives as a recluse in the very summer camp where that film was shot, so the boundaries between reality and fiction begin to blur. "A steamy stew of sex, death, VHS and junk food, Schoenbrun's delirious third film is their most accomplished, most persuasive and most playful movie yet," says Jessica Kiang in Variety.

Released on 7 August in the US and Canada, and on 21 August in the UK

The Jurassic Park/ World films are usually set in exotic locations, so it's intriguing to see a different kind of dinosaurs-v-humans scenario. Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) and produced by JJ Abrams (Lost, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), The End of Oak Street stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as ordinary suburban parents in an ordinary suburban neighbourhood. The only trouble is that this neighbourhood has somehow been teleported to a primeval wilderness. Will garden tools be enough to fend off the ravenous reptiles? "I love the Jurassic movies as much as anyone, but those films, for the most part, take place in these beautiful jungles, these distant islands," Abrams said in Empire. "David's whole approach here was the juxtaposition of the absolute mundane suburban family life and dinosaurs."

Released on 12 to 14 August internationally

Two friends smoke too much cannabis and then stumble into a world of dangerous crime. That's the outline of countless stoner comedies from Up in Smoke to Pineapple Express, but almost all of these films have something else in common: the friends in question are men. The Wrong Girls is one of the only female-led examples of the genre. Kristen Stewart (who is married to the film's writer-director, Dylan Meyer) and Alia Shawkat star as the slacker buddies who stumble across a consignment of an experimental new wonder drug. Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani provide the voices of their pet cats, who speak to them when they're hallucinating. "I kept making this joke during production that it was my memoir, which is very funny when you watch the movie because there's giant squids and telepathy and all kinds of other stuff in it," said Meyer in the film's press notes. "But it feels very autobiographical to me when I watch it." 

Released on 14 August in the US

Union County stars Will Poulter and Noah Centineo as two opioid-addicted brothers in rural Ohio who need to stay sober and hold down jobs if they want to keep out of prison. Poulter has been praised for his touchingly naturalistic performance, but the drama is authentic for other reasons, too: its debut writer-director, Adam Meeks, grew up in Ohio, and aside from Poulter and Centineo, almost all of the other people in the brothers' recovery programme are non-professional actors telling their own stories. "The film earns every emotional, lived-in development," says Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap, "instilling this slice-of-life portrait with such a quiet humanity that it can feel like you're sitting at the tables and in the meeting rooms along with all the characters." 

Released on 14 August in the US

Coyote vs Acme is a film we thought we'd never see. A Roger Rabbit-style mix of live-action actors and 2D animated characters, it focuses on two Looney Tunes favourites, Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner. In the classic cartoons, Coyote kept buying disastrously faulty gadgets, so in the film he sues the company that sells them, with Will Forte as his lawyer. The unusual part is that the finished film was shelved three years ago by Warner Bros, as the studio chose to take a tax write-off rather than release it. (The same thing happened to another Warner Bros film, Batgirl.) But now at last Coyote vs Acme is being released by an independent company. Its screenwriter, Samy Burch, has commented that Wile E Coyote's never-say-die persistence was inspiring. "There's beauty in that – in trying even when things are not coming easily and when you've failed a hundred times before," she said in Empire.

Released on 20 to 28 August internationally

Simon Farnaby, the co-writer of Paddington 2 and Wonka, brings his eccentric humour to another treasure of British children's literature: The Magic Faraway Tree novels by Enid Blyton. In Farnaby's modern version of Blyton's stories, an inventor and her husband, played by Clare Foy and Andrew Garfield, move to a remote cottage in the countryside to give their three children a break from the internet. The children then discover a tree that has portals to other worlds in its branches, and they encounter colourful characters including Silky (Nicola Coughlan), Moonface (Nonso Anozie), Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning), and the villainous Dame Snap (Rebecca Ferguson). "It's a smart update of the Blyton stories for the smartphone era," says Phil de Semlyen in Time Out. "With a cracking cast, thoughtful message and the odd rollicking adventure, it's a fun family movie that'll finally give you permission to switch off the wi-fi." 

Released on 21 August in the US and Canada

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