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The Guardian's season of British cult classics continues with a double helping of youth pop culture set in London in the 60s and 70s

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This week is pop culture week in our British cult classics series – well, sort of. Our double bill is a pair of films that turn fresh eyes on two different London youth tribes of the 60s and 70s: the black street soul of Notting Hill is celebrated in Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels, while the white working class suedehead world of Stratford is the focus of Barney Platts-Mills's Bronco Bullfrog. The former was a flagship production of the BFI Production Board, costing around £1.7m in 1990; Bronco was a rough-and-ready £18,000 shoot in 1970, taking off from Joan Littlewood's youth theatre workshops. But both show equal affection for their subjects, and from this distance are each a fantastically revealing...

Greenberg (15)

(Noah Baumbach, 2010, Us) Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh. 107 mins

Usually Ben Stiller is the guy you like in the movie, and the guy you laugh at. Here he's bravely subdued and unsympathetic – a self-absorbed slacker with extreme empathy issues – but you can still laugh at him. After a while, you might even like him. Drifting back to La, he picks at old relationship wounds and opens up fresh ones (with the winningly pathetic Gerwig) in a charming character study with indie values (and soundtrack) that under-achievers of a certain age will relate to.

Brooklyn's Finest (18)

(Antoine Fuqua, 2009, Us) Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke. 132 mins

Breaking news: law enforcement in the sketchier areas of New York is sometimes quite difficult. This three-pronged assault hammers the cliches home relentlessly, self-importantly detailing the trials of its compromised lawmen as if it's saying something new. Or something at all.

A breathtaking time capsule of early 70s London. By Peter Bradshaw

In 1970, Barney Platts-Mills's Bronco Bullfrog brought the improvisational energy of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Royal to the cinema screen in his low-budget east London love story, shot in black-and-white and featuring non-professional teens. Inevitably, there is something a little uncertain about it sometimes, but the principals, Del Walker and Anne Gooding, are winningly real, there is freshness and life and as a historical record it's pure gold. Walker looks a bit like Pete Townshend and Anne Gooding shows heartbreakingly what her teenage character Irene is going to be like at 40 or 50. The movie is a breathtaking time capsule of early 70s London, with The Golden Egg in Leicester Square, glass milk bottles with foil caps and saying "turn it over" instead of switch channels, because telly, like a coin, had but two sides.

Rating: 4/5

RomanceDramaPeter Bradshaw

guardian.co.

A rude, bracing slice of East End life that dropped off screens for decades, Bronco Bullfrog is finally back. Xan Brooks talks to the survivors of a British classic

One night in November 1970, Princess Anne tripped along to Oxford Circus for the London premiere of Three Sisters, a film starring and directed by Sir Laurence Olivier, who had recently been made a life peer in the birthday honours list. A pleasant evening lay in store – except that there, on the red carpet, the princess found herself face-to-face with the hoi polloi, the great unwashed. Some 200 members of the Beaumont youth club out in Leyton, east London, had shown up to jeer her. Some were reported to have chucked tomatoes at her head. These protesters did not think the princess should be on her way to see some stuffy Chekhov drama by a peer of the realm. They wanted her to...