IVANSXTC

Ivansxtc (sometimes styled Ivans xtc), shot in 1999 when the indies were beginning to get glossy, was, by contrast, a grimy ‘fuck you’ of a film. Filmed for nothing, and on digital (not the done thing back then, so problematic for cinemas), it was inspired by director Bernard Rose’s own misadventures in Hollywood as well as by his hard-living former agent Jay Maloney, and by Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The

Yet you can go in blind, knowing none of that, and still be shellshocked by its honesty and purity. Danny Huston gives an eerily real, sinister, sweaty performance as super-agent Ivan Beckman, a charismatic hedonist in the midst of an existential apocalypse. The whole film, in fact, feels like one big coke sweat. A raw portrayal of the rotten heart of Hollywood, it is so beautifully bitter: an exhilarating downer. Two decades on, now in hi-def, it feels just as relevant.