From American Graffiti to My Brilliant Friend: what to stream in Australia in December — theguardian.com

Set in the early 1960s in small-town California, this car-obsessed film – in which high school grads (including a young Richard Dreyfuss) cruise the streets ahead of their first year of college – may as well be from another galaxy, another time. George Lucas’s later Star Wars prequels were unfairly maligned – mad as they were, they were the vision of a sole artist, and who can say that of any Marvel product today? – and his ability to conjure entire, wondrous worlds is right here in this early Coppola-produced genre piece. Plot is replaced with focus on place, and the film’s nostalgia, vitality and intensity is at one with Lucas’s subject matter: an angry band of youth fighting, talking, driving, coming of age and busting out of their own small world in the American suburbs.

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