Sid & Nancy

Sid and Nancy has some claim on being the finest British film of the 1980s.

They are more than zombies doing needlepoint on each other's veins. Both are brought to life in complex, deeply felt performances from two actors who have abandoned themselves to enormously demanding and difficult roles.

Every character is booked through to hell or purgatory. But we gasp at the inventiveness, ferocity and cuckoo anarchy with which these rockers prepared their route to destruction or damnation.

Sid & Nancy is an honorable try, but it could have been better had Cox found a way to imbue the movie with some of the sheer zaniness of his Repo Man.

Once we sense a glimmer of talent and accept these people as human beings, the tragedy of their drug use resonates enormously.

This is a love story -- an unlikely, perverse, disturbing love story, but a genuine one.

Nancy serves as Cox’s metaphor for Sid’s addiction to heroin and his destructive, corrupt and greedy rock ‘n roll lifestyle...

Rather than trade in the overt romanticization of its subject, Sid & Nancy instead offers a perceptive observation of Vicious and Spungen as people.

Alex Cox's eye for capturing the grungy London and New York scenes in the late 1970s provides the picture with an added kick.

This is arguably Cox's finest film. It's arguably one of the United Kingdom's finest.