The World Cup has nearly been and gone and, now, we can enjoy the final without any expectations that we might actually win the thing. Our young, raw and slightly under-par team were a godsend, but it just wasn't quite enough. Now, we can cheer France or Croatia on without feeling so guilty.
But an entire World Cup is also a lot of football, which is why it's good to take a break in favour of a different kind of entertainment now all our emotions and spent. These films, streaming on NOW TV, all go from titles to credits in less time than it takes Egypt and Saudi Arabia to struggle to a 0-0 draw. So you can slip out as your friends settle in and be back in time for the post-match analysis.
1. Bloodsport (streaming now)
If you're entertained by how easily professional footballers collapse under contact, perhaps you'd like to see Jean Claude Van Damme unleash some more believable violence in this classic martial arts extravaganza. The set-up is so simple it could be an arcade game: an ex-Special Forces soldier has to fight his way into an underground tournament to honour his ninjutsu teacher's murdered son. Cue nemeses, training montages and the Muscles from Brussels contorting himself into eye-watering positions.
2. The House (streaming now)
The great-on-paper team-up of Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler doesn't disappoint on screen, saturating an unexpected plot – a couple turns their home into an illegal casino to pay for their daughter's college tuition – with serious yucks. Though oddly violent for a couples comedy – if you're not into charred flesh, move on – the Poehler-Ferrell chemistry always keeps things the right side of too much.
3. Kidulthood (streaming now)
Noel Clarke's ode to London kicks off with a teen suicide, and only gets more shocking from there. But this depiction a group of 15-year-olds in West London isn't about suffering, but fun; given the day off school courtesy of their classmate's death, they proceed to get wasted and get off with each other, backed by the cream of mid-00s British hip-hop (keep an ear out for appearances from Dizzee, Mike Skinner, Wiley, Roots Manuva and Lethal Bizzle).
4. Stand By Me (streaming now)
If you're in the mood for something with more tension than an England - Tunisia match, Stand By Me is a classic. Based on Stephen King's The Body, the film follows four boys in a small town in Oregon after they set out to discover the dead body of a missing child. The coming-of-age film isn't completely bleak, with comedic misadventures from the gang - Will Wheaton plays bookish Gordie, River Phoenix is Chris and Jerry O'Connell plays timid Vern.
5. It Comes At Night (streaming now)
There are few things scarier than watching England in a penalty shoot-out. But It Comes At Night runs them pretty close. Part The Shining, part Lord of the Flies, it centres on Joel Edgerton and his family, who've sealed themselves inside a remote farmhouse in an attempt to survive a virus that's killed off most of the rest of the world.
They begrudgingly take in a group of fellow survivors, reasoning that there's strength in numbers. At which point paranoia proves more deadly than any infection. Who's healthy? Who's not? And will anyone survive?
6. Toy Story (streaming now)
The greatest 'kids' film ever made? Pixar's game-changer split the family film timeline in two: before Toy Story, animations were something you plonked your children in front of to keep them quiet; after Toy Story, you hoped your sister would bring the baby over so you could enjoy the in-jokes, the intrigue and the suspenseful storytelling without the fear of someone catching you watching it alone. Two decades on, it's as emotionally wrought as ever. But if Gazza can cry over a yellow card, then you can shed a tear over two friends falling in style.
7. Anchorman (streaming now)
8. Airplane! (streaming now)
Up there with Anchorman as perhaps the most readily quotable film of all time, Airplane! is a pitch-perfect spoof of disaster movies, built around an impossibly funny performance from Leslie Nielsen as a doctor stuck on a plane with both pilots incapacitated by food poisoning. It boasts some of cinema's greatest sight gags – Julie Hagerty reinflating the autopilot, Otto, is an image never forgotten – as well its finest one-liner. Altogether now: "Surely you can't be serious." "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley."
9. A Fistful of Dollars (streaming now)
Just in case it rolls into extra time, Clint Eastwood's 100-minute debut as The Man With No Name is worth the punt. Armed only with his wits and a six-shooter, he plays two feuding clans against each other, to his own profit. Drawing on Japanese cinema as well as Italian neorealism, it reinvented the Western in a darker, more violent vein, creating shadows where before there had only been black and white.
Keep everyone happy throughout the World Cup by heading to NOW TV to stream over 1,000 world-class movies
