The Late Twentieth

This Super-16 neo-noir takes the psychological route through a morass of revenge and redemption motifs - notions of the former being displaced, the latter endlessly deferred. But for all its exploration of guilt rather than geezerdom, the film still can't quite cut its apparent aim of being a genre work with knobs on. Its anti-hero freezes when his girlfriend is blown away in a mini-mart heist, and is denied an obvious target for retribution when the shooter is immediately totalled by a passing car. Vigilantism (against the drug culture he blames) becomes his creed. He's sentenced and sectioned; escapes; obsesses. A particularly unsavoury Mr Big becomes his potential passport out of his own self-loathing nightmares. All this is shot and cut with invention, and some respect for the un-bludgeoned viewer, but it's hobbled with a ciné-allusive script.