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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)

42%
50%
59%
N/A
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N/A
42 %
Reviews Counted: 85 Fresh: 36  Rotten:49 Average Rating: 5.5/10
Runtime: 1 hr 43 mins
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. Clive Owen plays Graham, a former top mobster who has since retired to a nomadic life in the... [More]
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. [Less]

Genre: Dramas

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

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

DVD Info

Release:

Apr 11, 2005

[DVD Details]

DVD Features:

  • Region 1
  • Keep Case
  • Single Side - Single Layer
  • Widescreen - 16:9

Reviews

 
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06/24/06 03:55 AM
Geoff Andrew
Time Out
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Many subplots fizzle into nothing and the film drifts out in an ambiguous haze.

Full Review | Comment
05/14/04 08:16 AM
Ian Nathan
Empire Magazine
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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 | Comment
05/04/04 08:16 AM
Ryan Gilbey
Sight and Sound
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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 | Comment
04/23/04 08:17 AM
Jamie Russell
BBC
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Hodges builds a quiet and atmospheric sense of foreboding. But it never takes off.

Full Review | Comment
02/13/04 10:40 AM
Rich Cline
Shadows on the Wall
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10/29/03 05:16 PM
Channel 4 Film
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12/06/05 07:55 PM
Film Threat
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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 | Comment
04/19/05 06:36 AM
Harry Guerin
RTE Interactive (Dublin, Ireland)
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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 | Comment
02/10/05 04:39 PM
Brian Gibson
Vue Weekly (Edmonton, Canada)
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...ended up sending us to slumberland a good deal sooner than the title implied.

Full Review | Comment
01/04/05 04:48 AM
Luke Y. Thompson
New Times
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Atmospheric post-noir film of the London underworld that never amounts to much of anything.

Full Review | Comment
11/18/04 08:39 PM
Dennis Schwartz
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
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Next time Mike Hodges wants to make a movie, I would suggest he shoot it in total darkness and drop the dialogue.

Full Review | Comment
09/24/04 12:15 PM
Tony Medley
tonymedley.com
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[S]trip[s] the mobster film down to its bare essentials, and the result is stark and relentless...

Full Review | Comment
09/08/04 10:23 AM
MaryAnn Johanson
Flick Filosopher
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Ace noir title, OK noir movie.

Full Review | Comment
09/03/04 03:17 PM
David Elliott
San Diego Union-Tribune
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...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 | Comment
08/23/04 08:49 AM
Philip Martin
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
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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 | Comment
08/20/04 05:57 AM
Dan Lybarger
Kansas City Star
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Predictable to a fault.

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08/13/04 05:40 PM
Jeff Vice
Deseret News, Salt Lake City
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... Hodges is the kind of director who can breathe new life into old material with an offhand, deceptively minimalist approach.

Full Review | Comment
08/13/04 04:32 PM
Carol Cling
Las Vegas Review-Journal
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Too often sleepwalks to its inevitable finish.

Full Review | Comment
08/13/04 10:26 AM
Sean Means
Salt Lake Tribune
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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 | Comment
08/13/04 05:34 AM
Judith Egerton
Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)
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