Details
Movie Description
Cars full of fast-talking British hoods and rain-soaked city streets in the dead of night--that's the stuff of which Mike Hodges's (CROUPIER) impossibly cool neo-noir gangster thriller is made. Clive Owen plays Graham, a former top mobster who has since retired to a nomadic life in the woods. His little brother Davey (John Rhys-Davies) meanwhile swaggers through posh parties back in the city, dealing drugs and engaging in freewheeling sex and petty thefts until he's violently sodomized by a white-haired car dealer (Malcolm McDowell). His subsequent suicide brings Graham back into the seedy underworld he left behind on a mission of revenge. Before he can find his brother's rapist though, he has to tangle with the new head bad boy in town (Frank Stott), who thinks Graham's come to take his old spot back.
Much like Simon Fisher Turner's dissonant, avante-jazz score, the film dodges a straight-ahead story and instead breaks out in moody variations in the key of noir. Fatalistic dialogue, extreme masculine anxiety, a cast teeming with eccentrics, desolate streets, gray beaches, darkened elevators, and foreboding alleyways all blend into an atonal crime-jazz poem. The inestimable Charlotte Rampling plays Graham's concerned, and much older, ex-girlfriend. Fans of the more classic gangster entries may rest assured Graham eventually does rain violence down upon the deserving.
Film Notes
DVD Features:
Region 1
Keep Case
Single Side - Single Layer
Widescreen - 16:9
Theatrical Release: JUNE 18, 2004 (NY)
JUNE 25, 2004 (LA)
Industry Reviews
"Mr. Hodges directs with a jazz musician's self-contained suavity. His tricky, dazzling technique is deployed with almost casual professionalism..."
New York Times - A. O. Scott (06/18/2004)
"[A] minimalist, almost experimental noir, a stunningly stylized film that is intent on pushing genre boundaries."
Los Angeles Times - Manohla Dargis (07/02/2004)
"With quick dialogue, clever editing, and a somber noirish sense of intrigue..."
Entertainment Weekly - Erin Richter (11/26/2004)
"[A] gripping thriller..."
Uncut - Chris Roberts (07/01/2005)
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