Another Day In Paradise

The most unremittingly bleak and depressing indie offering to emerge from the States all year (with the possible exception of Paul Schrader's Affliction), this deeply fucked-up slice of white-trash junkie psychosis is a hard-hitting, supremely affecting journey into the black heart of the American nightmare, with some of its images powerful enough to merit comparison with Badlands, Taxi Driver and other similarly-flavoured excursions to hell.

The second feature of fifty-something director Larry Clark (Kids), Another Day in Paradise owes most of its ferocious power to a phenomenal lead performance from James Woods, looking more unhinged than ever before, as he essays a terrifyingly credible portrayal of a smack-addicted thief and borderline psychopath, obsessed with guns and prone to outbursts of shocking violence.

Brilliantly (if inappropriately) titled, Paradise is a road movie of sorts which takes up Kids' baton in a sense: it rages against the corruption of youth and innocence in an uncaring world, and the script shows plenty of compassion for its ill-starred protagonists.

Paradise's human centre is a withered, orphaned, fifteen-year-old junkie (Kartheiser) who robs vending machines for change to feed his habit, with his skin-and-bone girlfriend (Natasha Gregson Wagner). The pair of them are effectively adopted by junkie heist-meister and surrogate father-figure Woods, who offers them companionship, a regular fix and something vaguely resembling a stable home life, as they hit the road living from heist to heist, and selling their souls to the devil by degrees.

Melanie Griffiths gives her best performance in living memory as Woods' dizzy but good-hearted junkie girlfriend, while the kids are engagingly pathetic, but Woods steals the show completely: his performance is a maelstrom of torrential anger and extreme paranoia, his facial expressions magnificently tortured throughout, and he gets stuck into the lurid script with some relish.

Most of the dialogue (especially Woods') is priceless: ("Can you not just fuckin' shoot up like everyone else? Your needle phobia is wasting a lot of my good smack.") while the film maintains a claustrophobic atmosphere throughout, with a constant simmering hum of threat, menace and impending catastrophe around every corner.

The final half-hour heats up to boiling point, with a stunningly apocalyptic and affecting finale to remain long in the memory, and while it's sad and depressing almost to the point of masochism, Another Day In Paradise still towers impressively over the rest of the year's indie output.

Ugly, dispiriting, devastating, and damn near brilliant.