1970s; Harlem hood Frank Lucas has hijacked the New York heroin business by dealing directly with the Chinese growers in SE Asia and importing large amounts of the drug inside the caskets of soldiers killed in Vietnam. However his nemesis, flamboyant, tenacious and unbribable narcotics cop Richie Roberts, is on his tail and is determined to bring him down.
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HUNGER (2007)
Certification15 Our Rating
Bobby Sands was the IRA member who led the 1981 Long Kesh hunger strike as part of a campaign to achieve the status of political prisoners and not that of criminals. The first section of film deals with daily prison life, the 'dirty' protest and the violence, the second is a long discussion on the meaning of life with a sympathetic priest and the third depicts the last weeks and death of a man voluntarily dying of starvation.
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LA REINE MARGOT (1994)
Certification18 Our Rating
Centred on the intrigues leading up to and following the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, this historical drama begins with the arranged, loveless wedding of the Roman Catholic Marguerite de Valois, sister to the eccentric King Charles IX and daughter of the scheming Catherine de Medici, and the Huguenot Henri de Navarre. Despite Catherine's hope that the marriage may unite France, the mutual hatred felt by Catholics and Protestants soon degenerates into carnage and Margot, who has learned
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MESRINE: PART 1 A KILLER INSTINCT (2009)
Certification15 Our Rating
A crackingly realised biog of a man who relentlessly dodged death with a cocky ambivalence that frankly defies credulity. 'Mesrine' is stylishly shot, smoothly directed and perfectly, charmingly, sociopathically performed by Cassell. A tight, pacey thriller considerably enhanced by the fact that it's based in, well…fact. This first film takes us from his brutal initiation as a soldier during the horrors of Algeria's fight for liberation to the end of the 1960s via France and French Canada.
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MESRINE: PART 2 PUBLIC ENEMY NO 1 (2009)
Certification15 Our Rating
The last few years of Mesrine's life sees him starting to enjoy the fruits of his thievery but this is now a man tortured by his infamy; increasingly, egotistically consumed by his own invincibility. Mesrine part 2 is an odd film in the sense that it feels like half an hour of story dragged out to a feature length running time; Cassel still makes a crackingly charming psychopath mind
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THE KRAYS (1990)
Certification18 Our Rating
The Kemp brothers are superb in this atmospheric film of the violent rise, and eventual fall, of the notorious East End gangsters the Kray twins from their deprived childhood through their vicious protection and gambling empire to the infamous murder of Jack "The Hat" McVeigh in The Blind Beggar pub.
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