Rating: 
Summary: Moody and Brutal
Review: This moody British film, not to be confused with Samuel Becket's work of the same name, was chosen to "disturb" the festival audience, or so said the talking heads of the programming panel. Rent boy Tom (Daniel Newman) gets caught in the evil machinations of his pimp, gangster George Norris (Mark McGann) and a crooked cop Dunston (John Benfield), who enjoys using Tom from time to time, himself. A fateful twist causes Norris's accidental death during his attempted rape of Tom. Desperate to escape Norris's body and Dunston's pursuit, Tom seeks the solace and protection of a very unlikely pair, his downstairs American neighbors Max and Nicki.
Max is a hothead consumed with a passion for money, while Nicki is more down to earth, but a bit unfocused and uncommitted herself. Why in the world would Tom come to them? Desperation, indeed. Walking totally of their initial characters (or perhaps showing us how complex they are?), Max and Nicki, after little hesitation, agree to hide Tom out at their rustic cottage in Wales. A very confused Tom is attracted to Nicki's warmth, and they eventually "seduce" each other. We can understand Nicki's dissatisfaction with Max's self-absorbed hard shell of a personality, and her momentary attraction to Tom's complete vulnerability. And despite how implausible it may seem at first, their sex scene makes sense once we realize that Tom is seeking tenderness, not hot sex per se.
All in all, this film hits home with its theme of sex as a tool of power which even the power-obsessed themselves can't control. But it falls short trying to wrap things up with a fast and violent ending which leads Tom to a happy future, and leads Nicki to sacrifice much more than her husband, Max, does.
Rating: 
Summary: Idiotic in nearly every way!
Review: This recent release is about a rent boy in London who lives with a mobster who terribly abuses him and sets him out on the streets to turn tricks for other mobsters? I purposely ended the above sentence with a question mark as I really have no idea of what this film is about. It is the most muddled story I've seen in months (perhaps years). The few isolated aspects of the plot that I seemed to get were so implausible that I found myself either laughing (when I shouldn't have) or yelling at the screen due to the sheer stupidity of the script. I wondered why I had never heard of this film and now I know. It is terrible in every way, from the awful and over the top performances of actors, to the pretentious moodiness of its cinematography and art design. And, the DVD has absolutely abyssmal sound, at times so bad that I had to struggle to understand what characters were saying. Viewing this film became such an overbearing chore that I ended up turning it off about three-fourths of the way through - an "Endgame" that I'm sure the makers of this turkey were not hoping for. Don't waste your money!
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