DIRECTED BY Mike Hodges

STARRING Clive Owen, Malcolm McDowell, Charlotte Rampling

Opened April 30, Cert 15, 104 mins

This is Mike Hodges’ first gangster movie since 1971’s Get Carter, that milestone Brit-flick whose screenplay has become as familiar as the Dead Parrot Sketch. I’ll Sleep… is slower and broodier, and lacks the vicious graveyard humour of its predecessor, yet like Carter it pivots around the story of a gangster travelling across country to revenge his dead brother.

Clive Owen is Will Graham, a London crime boss who’s retired to rural Wales following a mental breakdown. When his brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), an apprentice hoodlum, commits suicide, Will throws off the squalor of his life in the country and returns to London and his carefully preserved hard-man paraphernalia to find out why.

The sequence where down-at-heel Will locks himself in a hotel room, then emerges pressed, shaved and hard as gunmetal, is the film’s definitive moment. Hodges has devised a promising set-up for a gripping revenge drama, and secured a superb cast, with the shadowy and intense Owen comfortably holding his own alongside veterans like McDowell and Rampling.

Yet while the location sequences in Brixton and Clapham reek of incipient violence, Hodges and screenwriter Trevor Preston appear to have been trying to create a myth or a fable as much as a realistic drama, which is where the problems begin. “I have often thought of I’ll Sleep… as a Samurai film,” Hodges has commented. “As with Jack Carter, Will Graham can’t escape his past.”

It’s a plausible notion, and Owen’s haunted stare frequently suggests a man driven by a fate he can’t control, but too often it looks as if they’ve peopled the movie with static archetypes and left the audience to fill in the gaps where the plot was supposed to go. We can probably manage to sketch in the past love affair between Will and restaurant owner Helen (a somewhat monotone Rampling), but the vile act of brutality from McDowell’s sinister businessman Boad which triggers Will’s vengeful comeback arrives without context or motivation. Likewise, the film’s ending abruptly saws off a major Owen/Rampling plot strand and leaves it hanging in mid-air, as if a couple of scenes went missing in the final edit.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead contains some potentially lethal ingredients, but somebody left this cake out in the rain.

OPENS MAY 7, CERT 18, 104 MINS

This is the true story of a multiple slaying at 8763 Wonderland Avenue, LA in 1981. Porn star John Holmes (Val Kilmer) was a coke buddy of the victims and?according to this script?had recently abetted them in an armed raid on dealer Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian). Nash beat a confession out of Holmes, leading to their murders. If this sounds familiar?porn star, coke, guns, disaster?it’s because Boogie Nights also featured a sequence based on these facts. Remember when Mark Wahlberg, Thomas Jane and John Reilly try to rip off a crack-smoking Alfred Molina? That was the Wonderland story, told with more drama and style than director James Cox manages here.

The cast and story are first-rate. The problem is the structure?a series of subjective flashbacks?which allows no time to develop Kilmer’s character. He just seems like a whining, feckless cokehead. And we’ve got enough of those without mythologising one who died in 1988?no matter how well-hung he was.

OPENS MAY 7, CERT 15, 115 MINS

A documentary on the troubled history of the Basque region of Spain?where the armed separatists ETA are in conflict with the Madrid government?the film sparked controversy last year in Spain, with boycotts from some of the groups featured.

Much of this will be lost on non-Spanish viewers. Director Julio Medem charts the conflict through talking-head interviews with politicians, journalists and academics?an approach that presumes a lot of pre-existing knowledge of Basque history. There are interesting details, and the testimonies of the ETA victims are moving. But it’s hard to keep up with the babble of acronyms standing for political parties, and you’re left frustrated by the way the interviewees contradict one another (the film has been accused of being pro-ETA through its suggestion that the government are just as bad as the terrorists). An established arthouse name, Medem’s formal approach is typically distinctive. Still, a straightforward documentary would probably have been more illuminating.

OPENS MAY 7, CERT 15, 99 MINS

Canadian maverick Guy Maddin follows Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary with another genre-bending monochrome fantasy from a nutty premise. It’ll be compared to lo-fi Lynch or Burton, but for all its flaws and confusions it’s dizzyingly unique, and as barmy as Bu

OPENS MAY 14, CERT 18, 90 MINS

Based on Jon King’s best-selling novel, this highly convincing expos

OPENED APRIL 30, CERT 15, 96 MINS

Depp here extends his run of eccentric, quizzical scene-stealers as Mort Rainey. He’s a reclusive, best-selling author holed up in an isolated cabin, wrestling with writer’s block and a messy divorce. Step forward hillbilly stalker John Shooter (John Turturro), claiming Rainey has plagiarised his story and demanding satisfaction?shoving a screwdriver through Rainey’s dog, burning down his house, and targeting his wife to make his point until Rainey, too, loses the plot.

Another King “writer’s nightmare” (see also Misery, The Dark Half), Secret Window also explores the trauma of divorce as Rainey sits mumbling bitterly outside his old home, bellowing at his wife’s new lover (Dark Half star Timothy Hutton), slowly falling apart at the seams. Director David Koepp, who delivered uneasy chills in Stir of Echoes, botches the shocks here, but lets you feel the paranoid loneliness of Rainey’s cabin and, with his committed cast, creates a minor but satisfying gothic psychodrama.