By James Luscombe

Ray Winstone plays Gary, a retired mid-level gangster who would be quite happy to spend the rest of his days tanning by the pool of his mountainside villa in Spain. One morning, a boulder the size of an asteroid lands in the middle of his pool, missing him by mere inches. The next day, his old friend Don (Ben Kingsley) arrives for a visit. As it turns out, Don becomes a much more violent disruption in Gary’s life than the 2000 pound rock in his swimming pool. Sexy Beast was directed by first-time feature director Johnathan Glazer, a veteran of music videos (Radiohead, Massive Attack), and thankfully he’s resisted the neophyte temptation of trying to be "cool." This is a wacky, absurdist thriller that manages to be tense and funny at the same time. The central tension in the film is that Don has been sent to enlist Gary’s help in a bank heist, and Don is entirely unwilling to take no for an answer. Gary’s fear of his former cohort goes right down to his bones. He senses the inevitability of a threat, just as he instinctively knows that agreeing to do this one last job may be the last decision he ever makes. There are some neat twists in Sexy Beast, including a heist that starts off like something out of a Michael Mann film, and ends up with the criminals botching it up in a hilariously surreal manner. But the real showstopper is Kingsley’s menacing, insistent performance as Don. His live wire intensity is so unsettling, you can’t help but laugh nervously whenever he enters a room.
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If you've ever wondered why Toronto's first wave punk scene lacks the oral histories, band biographies, and memoirs pouring out of similar scenes, Treat Me Like Dirt is for you — as evidenced by a first printing selling out a week before its release. "I didn't know that any of this had happened the way I knew that New York and London had these great punk movements," says author Liz Worth.... Read More
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Taking a break at about the halfway mark of director Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker, I realized my jaw was sore. I had been unconsciously clenching it from the first moment of The Hurt Locker, which chronicles a three-man team of explosives ordinance disposal (bomb s... Full Review
The Nope (Moka Only & Psy) - Melba
Vancouver, BC rapper/producer Moka Only has always been diverse, dropping everything from dusty underground jams to shiny commercial songs, but Melba might just be his most out there yet, invading Kool Keith's turf. Most of Moka's beats for Melba are made with emphasis on the low-end o... Full Review
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