LSD: Love, Sex & Dance

Jep Gambardella turns sixty-five on a terrace overlooking the Colosseum, where the wild partying keeps running into an existential void. Sorrentino’s most Felliniesque tribute to Rome won him the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s all painful revelry and, well, great beauty. — In summertime Rome, Jep Gambardella is sixty-five and still the most wanted guest at every dinner and party in town, and the best of them are the ones he throws himself on his terrace overlooking the Colosseum. Back when he was a young journalist, he wrote one novel, which won a prize and earned him a name as an artist. He hasn’t written a word since. — Oscar Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2014

Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle and Ewen Bremner play a gang of junkies you’d cross the street to avoid in Danny Boyle’s take on Irvine Welsh’s novel, a cult postcard from addiction with a legendary Britpop and techno soundtrack. It’s a blast, right up until you land in the worst toilet in Scotland. — Mark Renton is twenty-six, out of work and hooked on heroin, and in Leith, a district of Edinburgh, Sick Boy and Spud are using too, while Begbie prefers vodka and brawling. When a friend spells out for Renton how this is going to end, he decides to get clean. He buys two opium suppositories from his dealer to soften the comedown, and only then finds out what real craving is. — Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 1997 Best Film | BAFTA | 1997 Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Ewan McGregor) | BAFTA | 1997 Best Adapted Screenplay | BAFTA | 1996 Audience Award | Warsaw International Film Festival | 1996

Oscar-nominated Kate Hudson stars in this atmospheric story of music, writing and growing up, in which a fifteen-year-old hits the road with a band he’s meant to write about for a magazine. Cameron Crowe drew on his own life as Rolling Stone’s youngest contributor, and his screenplay won an Oscar. — In San Diego in 1973, a promising band sets off on tour, and fifteen-year-old William Miller goes along on assignment for Rolling Stone, leaving behind a mother who won’t let rock music through the door. Also along for the ride is a girl who insists on being called Penny Lane. Eventually the musicians work out what the boy actually does for a living. — Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 2001 Nominated for Best Editing | Oscars | 2001 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Kate Hudson) | Oscars | 2001 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Frances McDormand) | Oscars | 2001 Best Film - Musical or Comedy | Golden Globes | 2001 Best Supporting Actress (Kate Hudson) | Golden Globes | 2001 Nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Frances McDormand) | Golden Globes | 2001 Nominated for Best Screenplay | Golden Globes | 2001

Michał Marczak won the directing award at Sundance for this part-documentary, part-fiction portrait of millennial Warsaw a decade ago, where two friends roam the city from dusk till dawn, night after night. By the end you’ll wish you were twenty again. — Krzysztof is in his twenties, with nowhere he has to be, so he and Michał walk the streets of Warsaw from midnight on. Their nights are a blur of dancing, drugs, clumsy chat-up attempts and conversations that only dawn brings to a close. Everything’s fine until Krzysztof starts seeing Eva, who used to be Michał’s girlfriend. — Audience Award | New Horizons Film Festival | 2016 Best Director | Sundance Film Festival | 2016

Gaspar Noé (“Irreversible”), the leading provocateur of European cinema, wrote just seven pages of script before he shot this sexual odyssey, and it may be the furthest he has ever gone. Across the two years of the affair, you land, almost literally, in bed with the lovers. — It’s early on New Year’s Day when the phone wakes Murphy, asleep beside his young wife and their two-year-old child. The message on the machine is from Electra’s mother, whose daughter has been missing for a long time and who wants to know if he’s heard anything. Murphy stays in the flat and drifts back through his two years with Electra, the promises, the games and the mistakes.

Moodysson (“Show Me Love”) based this film about teenage rebellion on “Never Goodnight”, his wife’s autobiographical comic. Everyone in 1982 Stockholm says punk is dead, but a few thirteen-year-olds start a band anyway, and so what if nobody can play. For anyone who was ever thirteen. — It’s Stockholm in 1982, Bobo and Klara are thirteen, and the whole school keeps telling them punk is over. They start a band anyway, despite having no instruments and no idea how to play. Hedvig, meanwhile, goes to church and plays classical guitar, and the girls decide she’s going to be in the band. — Tokyo Grand Prix | Tokyo International Film Festival | 2013 Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 2013

Doug Liman shot it handheld himself for a raw, documentary feel, and critics called it the “Pulp Fiction” of a younger generation, a portrait of LA rave culture at its height. It’s a high-energy black comedy that tells one night three ways, and the story looks completely different every time. — It’s Christmas Eve in Los Angeles, and Ronna is short on rent and about to be thrown out of her flat. She’s working an extra shift at the supermarket when two customers ask her for twenty ecstasy pills, so she goes to a dealer and buys the stuff with money she doesn’t have. That same night, a colleague of Ronna’s flies off to Las Vegas with three friends for a wild night out. — Nominated for Best Director | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 2000 Nominated for Best Supporting Female (Sarah Polley) | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 2000

Think “Trainspotting” for our times, set to wild Irish-language rap: three Belfast rappers realise the most provocative thing they can shout is their grandparents’ language. Michael Fassbender has a supporting role, it won an audience award at Sundance, and the tracks will stay with you for weeks. — Years after the Troubles, three young men in Belfast start rapping in Irish. The authorities would much rather not hear the language at all, but the city starts listening, and within a few months these provocative rappers have become a political symbol. Their own families would much prefer they hadn’t. — NEXT Audience Award | Sundance Film Festival | 2024

When a 1994 law banned raves and dismissed their music as a succession of repetitive beats, the answer was a field outside a Scottish town, a sound system and one night two fifteen-year-olds will still be talking about in their forties. It’s shot in black and white, but only up to a point. — It’s 1994 in Livingston, Scotland. Fifteen-year-old Johnno is a nervous kid who does what he’s told, while his best friend Spanner is never out of trouble. When word goes round about an illegal rave in a field outside town, the two boys lie to their families and head out into the night. — Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Lorn Macdonald) | BAFTA | 2019 Nominated for Best Director | BAFTA | 2019

Anton Corbijn photographed Joy Division before making films, and his debut is one of the best music biopics ever. Sam Riley plays Ian Curtis so well that after fifteen minutes you stop seeing an actor. In black-and-white Manchester, the band rides the wave and a marriage falls apart beneath it. — In 1973 Ian Curtis is still at school in Macclesfield, but he’s already writing the lyrics he’ll one day sing. He marries Deborah young, and his band, Joy Division, grows faster than anyone planned. The marriage struggles to keep up with the fame, and he struggles even more. — C.I.C.A.E. Award - Special Mention | Cannes Film Festival | 2007 Golden Camera - Special Mention | Cannes Film Festival | 2007 Regards Jeunes Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2007 Label Europa Cinemas Award | Cannes Film Festival | 2007 Most Promising Newcomer Writer | BAFTA | 2008 Nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Samantha Morton) | BAFTA | 2008 Official Selection | CAMERIMAGE | 2007

Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale and Jonathan Rhys Meyers wear the glitter in the “Citizen Kane” of glam rock, a Cannes prizewinner from Haynes. David Bowie wouldn’t agree to a biopic, but real musicians inspire it at every turn, and members of Radiohead and Sonic Youth play in its bands. — Brian Slade is a glam rock star who performs as the alien Maxwell Demon, until one night he is shot during a concert. The shooting was supposedly staged, and Slade disappeared straight afterwards. A decade later, New York journalist Arthur Stuart is assigned to find out what became of him, and he starts with Slade’s manager and his ex-wife. On that fateful night, Stuart was in the crowd. — Nominated for Best Costume Design | Oscars | 1999 Best Artistic Contribution | Cannes Film Festival | 1998 Best Costume Design | BAFTA | 1999 Nominated for Best Makeup and Hair | BAFTA | 1999 Best Cinematography | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 1999 Nominated for Best Feature | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 1999 Nominated for Best Director | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 1999