IN 1981, IN MILPITAS, California, a 16-year-old boy raped and murdered his girlfriend. Over the next few days, he took friends on trips to see her corpse, left lying by the riverbank.
Highly entertaining Stephen King adaptation, stylishly directed by David Koepp, with a mesmerising Johnny Depp as a best-selling mystery writer in the throes of a messy divorce who's accused of plagiarism—and threatened with unpleasant retribution—by sinister hillbilly John Turturro. Cue havoc on all fronts, and bodies piling up very quickly indeed. Splendid.
There's a dark rumble to Massive Attack's instrumental score for this Luc Besson-produced martial arts movie, arranged by Robert Del Naja and Neil Davidge in 21 miniature sequences. Many of these are a minute or so long, so it's hard to cite them as anything special, and the nagging feeling persists that there's been an element of smoke and mirrors about this outfit's fashionable misery since their heyday. Those pieces that are allowed time to breathe suggest greater depths, like "One Thought At A Time", which clocks in at a whopping four minutes plus.
Tony Richardson's 1968 version of the military disaster mirrors the decade it was made in, with a strong anti-war theme. David Hemmings is a young trooper, Trevor Howard his brutal commanding officer and John Gielgud the high-ranking buffoon who orders the attack. An ambitious mess, but still compelling.
