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Actor · 1961

Tim Roth

6: briefs
13:00: average
78 min: in total

On film.briefs6

Little Odessa

James Gray · 1994

James Gray’s 1994 debut Little Odessa follows a Russian-Jewish hitman who returns to his estranged family in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach — a neighbourhood nicknamed 'Little Odessa' for its Soviet immigrant population. Shot by Tom Richmond in muted, low-light tones, the film traces Joshua Shapira’s slow re-immersion in a world of inherited trauma, terminal illness, and unspoken loyalties. Its power lies not in action but in accumulation: glances held too long, doors left ajar, bodies carried in sheets. It is a film of restraint, where violence is routine and grief is domestic.

Meantime

Mike Leigh · 1983

Mike Leigh’s 1983 Meantime observes four days in an East London working-class family amid rising unemployment and social fragmentation. With Tim Roth, Phil Daniels, Gary Oldman, and Pam Ferris, it uses rigorous rehearsal-based performance and unadorned cinematography to render austerity as atmosphere, not argument — a precise, unsentimental study of endurance in the early Thatcher years.

The Hit

Stephen Frears · 1984

Stephen Frears’ 1984 British crime film follows a retired informant, a world-weary hit man, and his volatile apprentice on a slow, sun-bleached drive across Spain toward an unseen reckoning. With Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth in career-defining roles, and Paco de Lucía’s flamenco-inflected score, it replaces thriller mechanics with existential weight — finding dread not in danger, but in duration.

Planet of the Apes

Tim Burton · 2001

Tim Burton’s 2001 Planet of the Apes is a visually rich, commercially successful remake that prioritises creature design, production scale, and tonal consistency over narrative coherence or thematic depth. Starring Mark Wahlberg and Helena Bonham Carter, it recasts the ape-dominated world as a tactile, myth-saturated empire — impressive in execution, thin in conception. Critics noted its craft and score but faulted its script and ending. It earned $362 million worldwide but was not followed by a sequel.

Pulp Fiction

Quentin Tarantino · 1994

Quentin Tarantino's 1994 crime film interlaces three Los Angeles stories, a hitman duo, a boxer on the run, and a night that turns into a medical emergency, around a diner heist told from both ends. Built on scrambled chronology and extended, digressive dialogue, it became one of the most commercially and critically successful independent films ever made.

Reservoir Dogs

Quentin Tarantino · 1992

Quentin Tarantino's 1992 debut follows six career criminals, known to each other only by colour-coded aliases, after a jewellery heist collapses within minutes. Confined largely to one warehouse and told through flashbacks rather than the robbery itself, it built its reputation on tense dialogue, a single notorious torture scene, and its influence on the crime cinema that followed it.