Strange Days

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Start your New Year celebrations the right way, with a riot in the streets and a 1995 box office flop that was way ahead of its time!

LA, Year Zero: 30 December 1999. Riot police are on the streets. The angry, poor, disenfranchised – the Blacks – are ready to tear down the walls of the city. Yet Lenny Nero fiddles while LA burns. A sleazeball in an Armani suit, Lenny’s dealing illicit “playback clips”, raw human experience recorded direct from the cerebral cortex.

Kathryn Bigelow’s spectacular millennial maelstrom divided critics at the time. Written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, this is tech-noir, action movie and love story rolled into one. It also pursues a sophisticated treatise on the nature of voyeurism, the psychic dangers of vicarious entertainment and cinema itself. The movie’s impeccable moral centre is to be found in Angela Bassett’s karate-chopping single mother Mace, who rescues Lenny from his own faithless stupor. Nero isn’t irredeemable, either: Ralph Fiennes makes him a persuasively seedy knight errant. In fact, despite its own barely suppressed despair, the film exhibits markedly progressive leanings. It’s brilliant, provocative film-making.

Marvellously weird… it could very well have been written by Philip K. Dick. Its paranoid fascination with technology, to say nothing of its frustration, is that palpable.

K Austin Collins, The Ringer

The world of Strange Days and its sense of impending apocalypse is not so different from our own—a grim statement, to be sure… So ahead of its time, so involved in its myriad of narrative threads, so full of virtuosic formal innovations, so rich in its cultural commentary, and so sybilline in its portrait of the future that its reappraisal seemed inevitable.

Brian Eggert, deepfocusreview.com

Bigelow encapsulated a million paranoias under one guise, and her craft borders on the sublime. From the visceral plunges of the first person mind clip sequences to the overwhelming finale this is a, literally, stunning event. Some directors can, thank God, still make you experience films.

William Thomas, Empire magazine