Charlotte Rampling

Nothing about "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is as straightforward as it appears. A title that echoes vintage mysteries like "I Wake Up Screaming" and a film noir plot conjure up traditional images of tough guy revenge, but things are nowhere near that simple. What we have instead is a minimalist, almost experimental noir, a stunningly stylized film that is intent on pushing genre boundaries.

Alan Parker's occult thriller "Angel Heart" (citywide) is the color of marcasite--steely gray-silver and cold even when its actors are steaming in New Orleans humidity. It is a movie cool to the eye, but it's hell's own terrifying vision. It's not the universal, you-are-there, clutching terror of "Blue Velvet," which somehow bypassed the brain and went straight to the soul, but a precisely manufactured sense of doom that escalates as its intricate story unwinds.

IT'S BEEN 23 years and Molly Ringwald still has a regret about her "Breakfast Club" days. Her off-screen romance with Anthony Michael Hall? Hardly. The fact that she originally wanted to play Ally Sheedy's quirky role? Over it. She bites her lower lip ruefully and shakes her rusty auburn curls. "Now, I wish that I kept those boots," she says. "I loved those boots." Who didn't? The lace-up Ralph Lauren equestrian boots that grazed her freckled knees in the film became every teen girl's tantrum-inducing must-have in 1985.

Going defiantly against the grain of a hyperbolic movie culture, "Never Let Me Go" is passionate about deliberation and restraint. Starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley, the A Team of young British acting talent, this is a moving and provocative film that initially unsettles, then disturbs and finally haunts you well into the night. Based on the celebrated novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, "Never Let Me Go" is suffused with the kind of longing for what cannot be that is implicit in its title.

The all-important May sweeps period kicks off Thursday with new episodes of NBC's "must-see TV," a two-hour "Diagnosis Murder"on CBS and a two-hour wrestling special on UPN. The heavy ammo ends May 26 with the season finales of NBC's "Law & Order" and the ABC comedies "Dharma & Greg" and "The Drew Carey Show." Below are sweeps highlights: SIGNING OFF "The Nanny": The voice is silenced! Fran Drescher's sitcom bids adieu after six seasons in a one-hour send-off. CBS, May 19.

Cannes is always the film festival that critics have to go to, but this year it's shaping up as a place you actually might want to be. With Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" opening its 64th edition Wednesday night, Cannes is known as an event where art and commerce coexist uneasily, where the 20 presumably rarefied films in the official competition share time and space with the sprawling Marche du Film, a marketplace where 4,079 companies from...

Thea Porter, an influential London fashion designer who catered to the anti-status mood of the 1960s with the rich-hippie look and to the more laid-back '70s with opulent caftans, died of a lung infection in London on Monday. She was 72. "I became a designer because I wanted perfection for others," said the woman whose distinctive clothing was worn and collected by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand and the empress of Iran.

MELANIE Lynskey is not yet 30, and she's about to get married to an actor. The New Zealander has played Charlie Sheen's stalker, Rose, on "Two and a Half Men" since 2003, but on Monday night's episode ... well, no spoilers about how it all unfolds, please.

L.A.'s menswear look is traveling around the world. Sophia Loren's sons, Carlo Ponti Jr., 18, and Eduardo Ponti, 15, recently hopped down to Bell Gardens, no less, to visit Zeppelin, which sounds like a band, but it's really a clothing firm. The youngest Ponti was about to leave for boarding school in Switzerland and needed some new school things, he said. He bought denims and heavy-duty sweater tops.

Dissolute movie producers have told all in books like "The Kid Stays in the Picture" and "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again." But what about the less flashy producers, those staid men and women who anxiously strive to keep their budgets and directors under control? That's the story Michael Deeley means to tell in "Blade Runners, Deer Hunters, and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies."