I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

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 (director of 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.

"Revenge is a dish served again and again in the movies, and connoisseurs will note the special British flavor that Mike Hodges brings to the table." -- A.O. Scott, NEW YORK TIMES
"Does the film work? All I know is that it stays in my mind for its ambitiously autumnal essence, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea." -- Andrew Sarris, NEW YORK OBSERVER

"[Hodges] still knows how to unspool a mystery with a hypnotic pace of sadistic intrigue." -- Owen Gleiberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead may take its place with GET CARTER as a classic British gangster film." -- Ray Bennett, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER