Lucy Reeves Movies

Music video director Jamie Thraves made his feature debut with this cinema verite look at a group of bohemian Londoners straddling the line between apathy and ambition. Aidan Gillen (of the popular British TV series Queer As Folk) plays Frank, a prop artist who spends his free time chain-smoking, drinking, pontificating, and chain-smoking some more. He's at a crossroads, however: Unable to tolerate his loud, drug-dealing neighbors, he considers buying a flat of his own. At the realtors, he meets the fetching Ruby (Kate Ashfield), who shows him a variety of dismal real estate opportunities, barely veiling her contempt for the offerings. Charmed, Frank begins to go out with Kate, and as their relationship heats up, Frank notices changes in his group of laterally mobile friends. Mike (Dean Lennox Kelly) begins to take on more responsibility, both at the prop shop and in his personal life, as he proposes marriage to his longtime girlfriend -- putting him at odds with the more lackadaisical John (Tobias Menzies), a chronically tardy co-worker who's beginning to reconsider his career track. Frank finds himself mediating between the two, and unable to make any definitive choices in his own life. The Low Down made its North American Premiere at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide

The quartet of short films for this British anthology, compiled by Women Make Movies, were all made for the British Film Institute and BBC Films in 1994. The central theme unifying them is death. In the first short, "White Men Are Cracking Up," from Ngozi Onwurah, several prominent British colonialists commit suicide. The detective assigned to the cases investigates and discovers that each of the deceased saw an enigmatic African woman perform a traditional dance. Pratibha Parmar directed the second vignette "Memsahib Rita," to chronicle the internal culture class suffered by a London girl with a British mother and a Sri Lankan father. In Dani Williamson'g "Get Me to the Crematorium on Time," a recently widowed middle-aged, financially comfortable black woman struggles to keep her sanity while trying to cope with her husband's death, finding comfort only by conversing with his ghost. Finallyj, in Frances-Anne Solomon's "Bideshi," a comatose middle-aged man from Bengal attempts to put his life affairs in order before leaving his injured body. His life flashes by in brief episodes beginning with his emigration to Britain. He then sees his daughter's birth and from there watches as she rebels, grows distant and prepares to have a black man's child, something that has caused a great rift between father and daughter. Still while drifting in sleep, the Bengali sends his spirit forth to make peace with her. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide