There’s a new British film coming soon called Dead Man Running. It features the rapper 50 Cent (aka Curtis “No Relation of the King of Pop” Jackson) as an American loan shark who, suffering in the financial downturn, visits these shores to lean somewhat heavily on a couple of defaulters. The film includes the obligatory flavourings for this sort of cheerful low-life caper: a dog track, and Danny Dyer. But in case you think you know exactly where you are with Dead Man Running, wait up.
film features
Matt Wolf
Away We Go is the name of Sam Mendes's fifth film, released in Britain this week. But the title could also serve as the buccaneering mantra of a Cambridge-educated Englishman whose career continues to shed any whiff of his home country. On stage or screen, the director is continually drawn to stories culled from across the Atlantic, where he now lives. And why not? If you had directed a first film called American Beauty that would lead to five Oscars and America eating out of your hand, you, too, might well return for more. Mendes's output isn't merely a reflection of his taste, although that part of it is important, too; it's common sense.
sheila.johnston
As graceful in his approach to death as he was in life, Patrick Swayze died yesterday at the age of 57. I met the actor in 1995 at a turning point in his career, just as the sexy lustre of Dirty Dancing and Ghost was beginning to wear thin. It would have been easy to mock Swayze as a crank for his New Age eccentricities, but his charm, his ingenuousness and his can-do ebullience - a determined energy that also distinguished him in his fight against pancreatic cancer - all proved irresistible. Here is a slightly edited version of that encounter.
sheila.johnston
Hunter S Thompson always had one beady, sun-bespectacled eye on posterity. At 21, living in poverty in a remote cabin in the Catskills and toiling away at an autobiographical first novel, Prince Jellyfish (still unpublished), he would immodestly compare his own progress to that of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, two other writers who came late to public recognition.