Sling Blade
Billy Bob Thornton proves just what a renaissance man he is. As well as playing the lead, he wrote and directed this tale soaked in Deep South Gothic.
He plays Karl Childers, a seeming idiot savant who has just been released into society after spending 25 years incarcerated for killing his mother and her lover with a sling blade (a rounded machete).
Through good fortune he is taken into the heart of a 12-year-old boy and his mother, with only her abusive boyfriend creating any waves.
But this is no Forrest Gump, and life is no box of chocolates for Childers, who finds it hard to stomach the tyrannical oppression the people he thinks of as family have to endure.
A wondrous performance by Thornton welds the movie superbly, with a complex portrayal of someone who challenges the concept of right and wrong. Very moving without plunging into muddy sentimentalism, Sling Blade is a genuinely beautiful film full of a very rare ingredient in cinema: soul.
Most watched News videos
- New video shows Epstein laughing and chasing young women
- British Airways passengers turn flight into a church service
- Epstein describes himself as a 'tier one' sexual predator
- Skier dressed as Chewbacca brutally beaten in mass brawl
- Two schoolboys plummet out the window of a moving bus
- Buddhist monks in Thailand caught with a stash of porn
- Melinda Gates says Bill Gates must answer questions about Epstein
- Police dog catches bag thief who pushed woman to the floor
- Holly Valance is shut down by GB News for using slur
- Sarah Ferguson 'took Princesses' to see Epstein after prison
- JD Vance turns up heat on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor
- China unveils 'Star Wars' warship that can deploy unmanned jets
