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Movies / On DVD / I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

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I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2004)

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Reviews Counted:85

Fresh:36

Rotten:49

Average Rating:5.5/10

Runtime: 1 hr 43 mins

Genre: Dramas

Synopsis: 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.... 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. [More]

Starring: Clive Owen, Jonathan Rhys-Myers, Malcolm McDowell, Charlotte Rampling

Starring: Clive Owen, Jonathan Rhys-Myers, Malcolm McDowell, Charlotte Rampling, Frank Stott

Director: Mike Hodges

Director: Mike Hodges
Screenwriter: Trevor Preston
Producer: Michael Corrente, Michael Kaplan
Composer: Simon Fisher Turner
Studio: Paramount Classics

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Reviews for I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

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1 - 20 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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N/R

Click to read the article

Full Review Source: Time Out | comment Comment
06/24/06
Geoff Andrew
Geoff Andrew
Time Out
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Many subplots fizzle into nothing and the film drifts out in an ambiguous haze.

Full Review Source: Empire Magazine | comment Comment
05/14/04
Ian Nathan
Ian Nathan
Empire Magazine
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Some effort is made to question the macho values of the crime genre, and it is this that best distinguishes I'll Sleep When I'm Dead from other recent British thrillers.

Full Review Source: Sight and Sound | comment Comment
05/04/04
Ryan Gilbey
Ryan Gilbey
Sight and Sound

With little investment in their fates and little understanding of their real motives, it's a moribund movie that's caught napping far in advance of its final breath.

Full Review Source: BBC | comment Comment
04/23/04
Jamie Russell
Jamie Russell
BBC
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Hodges builds a quiet and atmospheric sense of foreboding. But it never takes off.

Full Review Source: Shadows on the Wall | comment Comment
02/13/04
Rich Cline
Rich Cline
Shadows on the Wall
N/R

Click to read the article

Full Review Source: Channel 4 Film | comment Comment
10/29/03
Channel 4 Film
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Click to read the article

Full Review Source: Film Threat | comment Comment
12/06/05
Film Threat
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

While the performances are excellent and the Get Carter-in-reverse plot is intriguing, this is a film where atmospherics triumph over the script.

Full Review Source: RTE Interactive (Dublin, Ireland) | comment Comment
04/19/05
Harry Guerin
Harry Guerin
RTE Interactive (Dublin, Ireland)

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead deftly traces the sad, steady pulse just under the skin of things . . . the lingering images etching out their own fitting epitaph.

Full Review Source: Vue Weekly (Edmonton, Canada) | comment Comment
02/10/05
Brian Gibson
Brian Gibson
Vue Weekly (Edmonton, Canada)

...ended up sending us to slumberland a good deal sooner than the title implied.

Full Review Source: New Times | comment Comment
01/04/05
Luke Y. Thompson
Luke Y. Thompson
New Times

Atmospheric post-noir film of the London underworld that never amounts to much of anything.

Full Review Source: Ozus' World Movie Reviews | comment Comment
11/18/04
Dennis Schwartz
Dennis Schwartz
Ozus' World Movie Reviews

Next time Mike Hodges wants to make a movie, I would suggest he shoot it in total darkness and drop the dialogue.

Full Review Source: tonymedley.com | comment Comment
09/24/04
Tony Medley
Tony Medley
tonymedley.com

[S]trip[s] the mobster film down to its bare essentials, and the result is stark and relentless...

Full Review Source: Flick Filosopher | comment Comment
09/08/04
MaryAnn Johanson
MaryAnn Johanson
Flick Filosopher

Ace noir title, OK noir movie.

Full Review Source: San Diego Union-Tribune | comment Comment
09/03/04
David Elliott
David Elliott
San Diego Union-Tribune

...a kind of inside-out noir, a stately film about the sad progress of a diminished and sad but still frightful and dangerous monster.

Full Review Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette | comment Comment
08/23/04
Philip Martin
Philip Martin
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Hodges and Preston have a commendable attitude, but with the thin story and shallow characters, even the right idea doesn't seem as interesting as it should be.

Full Review Source: Kansas City Star | comment Comment
08/20/04
Dan Lybarger
Dan Lybarger
Kansas City Star

Predictable to a fault.

Full Review Source: Deseret News, Salt Lake City | comment Comment
08/13/04
Jeff Vice
Jeff Vice
Deseret News, Salt Lake City

... Hodges is the kind of director who can breathe new life into old material with an offhand, deceptively minimalist approach.

Full Review Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal | comment Comment
08/13/04
Carol Cling
Carol Cling
Las Vegas Review-Journal

Too often sleepwalks to its inevitable finish.

Full Review Source: Salt Lake Tribune | comment Comment
08/13/04
Sean Means
Sean Means
Salt Lake Tribune

In the end, it is the complex aura surrounding Owen's character...that stay with the viewer long after the threads of the story have unraveled in one's mind.

Full Review Source: Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) | comment Comment
08/13/04
Judith Egerton
Judith Egerton
Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)
 
 
1 - 20 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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