I missed this movie when it first came out in 2000 but recently caught the DVD. It’s totally harrowing, about four characters in Brooklyn suffering horribly from various addictions. The whole movie is permeated with images of drugs, loneliness and despair. It’s the kind of movie where at the end you’re sitting there silently thinking, “I don’t feel so good…”

There’s some funny comments on the IMDB message boards, especially the ones about “movies that make you feel like crap.” It is a real downer, but I think it’s brilliant and an important movie about the suffering of life and the ways that so many of us try to avoid it. The DVD has an interview with the author Hubert Selby Jr., who wrote the novel it’s based on, and it’s very enlightening.