Sick film makes fans 'throw up' over controversial scenes – but it's not a horror dailystar.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailystar.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
An occasionally strange, occasionally brutal and occasionally lovely work that goes up on the shelf with The Ocean of Helena Lee and Girlhood as one of the more impressive coming-of-age tales of recent times.
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How should this movie be approached? As an exploitation of child abuse? As a fearless portrait of a childhood in hell? As an acting and filmmaking enterprise pushed to heroic extremes? The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is the unrelenting story of a little boy torn away from a loving foster home at the age of 7, and subjected for years to a series of physical and psychological cruelties. There is no redemption, no surcease, and as the film ends the barbarity continues. This film made me intensely uncomfortable, but that was its intention.
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The material is drawn by short stories by JT LeRoy, whose work was widely considered to be autobiographical the memories of an abused boy who grew up to become a prostitute and finally spilled out all his remembered pain in thinly disguised fiction. As it turns out, the fiction was more heavily disguised than its admirers realized: JT LeRoy now appears to be a 40-year-old woman named Laura Albert, and wh