Scénarios

After a shooting in London goes hideously wrong, two hitmen, Ray and Ken, are sent to hide out in the strange, Gothic, medieval town of Bruges, Belgium, by their volatile and dangerous boss, Harry Waters.

While awaiting instructions from him as to what to do next, the pair attempt to deal both with their feelings over the botched killing and their differing attitudes towards this curious, otherworldly place they’ve been dumped in (‘Bruges is a shithole.’ ‘Bruges is not a shithole’), until the call from Harry finally comes through, and all three men are enmeshed in a spiral of bloody violence that few will get out of alive.

The greatest criminal minds of all time finally meet their match in this, the Coen brothers’ riotous Deep South reinvention of Alexander Mackendrick’s beloved 1955 Ealing comedy.

Tom Hanks stars as Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, a charlatan professor who has assembled a crew of crooks to try and pull off the heist of the century. Their base of operations is the root cellar of an unsuspecting church-going lady by the name of Mrs Munson (Irma P. Hall). The story they offer Mrs Munson is that they are a band of musicians in need of a place to practise their church music. But it fast becomes apparent that Dorr’s gang – ‘hippety-hop’ enthusiast Gawain MacSam, demolition ‘expert’ Garth Pancake, Vietnamese ex-tunnel rat ‘The General’, and football jock Lump – may not be up to the mission at hand.

In May 1979, Francis Ford Coppola unveiled a ‘work in progress’ cut of his film, Apocalypse Now, at the Cannes Film Festival. After winning the prestigious Palme d’Or, the convention-shattering film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and became a worldwide phenomenon. In 2001 Coppola introduced a new version – wholly re-edited from the original raw footage – that included forty-nine minutes of never-before-seen footage: Apocalypse Now Redux.

The Hours is David Hare’s screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In Richmond, England in 1923, Virginia Woolf is setting out to write the first words of her new book. In Los Angeles in 1951, a housewife, Laura Brown, is contemplating suicide. And in present-day New York, a hostess, Clarissa Vaughan, is planning a party for her friends. In extraordinary and ingenious ways, the film shows how a single day – and the novel Mrs Dalloway – inextricably link the lives of three very different women.

Only 23-years-old when he directed his extraordinary début feature Gummo, Harmony Korine has since continued to serve notice that he is the riskiest, most radical young talent in independent US film. This collection of three screenplays displays his defiantly unorthodox approach to film form, as well as the unclassifiable imaginative energy that drives all of his work.

Swingers is an affectionate, hilarious ode to the fine arts of friendship, bar-hopping and girl-chasing. Told in the hip retro-vernacular of the nineties lounge lizard, it’s the tale of a ‘rat-pack’ of young under-employed actors, hanging out together in Hollywood. Mike is pining for his ex-girlfriend; his suave buddy Trent wants to entice him away from his stuffy apartment and back out among ‘the beautiful babies’ on the club scene.

Set in the appropriately Gothic surroundings of contemporary Edinburgh, Shallow Grave presents a trio of affluent characters whose feckless lives are disrupted when they discover the corpse of their recently arrived flatmate, plus a suitcase bulging with money beneath his bed. The stage is thus set for a morality play about friendship and filthy lucre. The story balances on a knife-edge between ebullience and violence as the forces of destruction gather to claim their greedy victims.

Reservoir Dogs is the story of a heist gone wrong, and how the group of outlaws concerned are subsequently undone in the course of their search for the enemy within.

Quentin Tarantino uses words like bullets and writes with a propulsive energy that is compellingly readable. As always with Tarantino, the style of the storytelling is restlessly inventive, showcasing not only his fine ear for frank and foul-mouthed dialogue but also his grasp of formal structure, comparable to that of the smartest crime novelists.