The film that effectively launched the star careers of Robert Carlyle, Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller is a hard, barbed picaresque, culled from the bestseller by Irvine Welsh and thrown down against the heroin hinterlands of Edinburgh. Directed with abandon by Danny Boyle, Trainspotting conspires to be at once a hip youth flick and a grim cautionary fable. Released on an unsuspecting ...
Presenting a bleak, harrowing, and yet ultimately hopeful vision of humankind's not-too-distant future, Children of Men is a riveting cautionary tale of potential things to come. Set in the crisis-ravaged future of 2027, and based on the atypical 1993 novel by British mystery writer P.D. James, the anxiety-inducing, action-packed story is set in a dystopian England where humanity has become ...
The film that effectively launched the star careers of Robert Carlyle, Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller, Trainspotting is a hard, barbed picaresque, culled from the bestseller by Irvine Welsh and thrown down against the heroin hinterlands of Edinburgh. Directed with abandon by Danny Boyle, it conspires to be at once a hip youth flick and a grim cautionary fable. McGregor, Lee Miller ...
There's not too much originality to the concept behind ITV's drama series The Fixer. But it's the execution of it that lifts the show onto the recommend pile. John Mercer (played by Andrew Buchan) finds himself let out of prison early, albeit with a bit of a catch. It soon becomes clear that the price Mercer must pay for his early release is to become a hired gun for the authorities, ...
Few things are more sure-fire creepy than huge abandoned buildings, and Session 9 has one of the eeriest buildings you've ever seen. A hazardous-materials-cleanup company has been hired to eliminate asbestos tiles and other toxic material from a gigantic mental hospital that had been shut down in the 1980s. But as one member of the team starts to nose into old files in the office, he ...
David Mackenzie's Young Adam, based on Alexander Trocchi's existentialist novel, demonstrates that Ewan McGregor means what he says about using high-paying Hollywood roles to finance appearances in intelligent low-budget movies. As Joe, an aspiring 1950s writer whose alienated selfishness destroys everyone around him, he is quietly authoritative. Tilda Swinton and Emily Mortimer are hardly ...
Possessed of startlingly fresh performances and a visual style of genuine panache, Shallow Grave was deservedly a BAFTA Best Film winner in 1994. This was clearly a film that deserved attention. Sure enough, the principal talents involved (Director Danny Boyle, Producer Andrew Macdonald, Writer John Hodge and actors Christopher Eccleston and Ewan McGregor) have gone on to huge successes ...
Miss Julie is a claustrophobic class study set within a 19th-century Count's kitchen. It chronicles the events of one midsummer night when the housemistress--an obstinate and confused Julie (Saffron Burrows)--is beaten in a round of sexual gaming with footman Peter Mullan. Based on the play by August Strindberg, the film maintains a constant sense of theatre by only having three speaking ...