VICIOUS IN LOVE

Even in death, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols is stirring controversy.

“Sid and Nancy,” a “love story” about Vicious and Nancy Spungen, the American groupie with whom he was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in a New York hotel room in 1978, is drawing mostly youthful crowds at Central London’s Lumiere Theater. And it’s divided the British critics.

The Evening Standard dismissed it: “If you do not believe in Sid and Nancy and their great love, all that’s in it for you is a trip through booze, drugs, sex and sick.”

But the tabloid Tattler called director Alex Cox “a genius” for pulling off the troubled life story of Sid and Nancy.

The Times gave a mixed review to what it deemed “a clinical case history of two pitifully disordered people,” but praised its “capture of reality” and “extraordinary” performances.

Meanwhile, star Gary Oldman has decided he’ll no longer do interviews about the film. According to a rep, Oldman “was taken aback” by the flurry of attention that he and the film drew at Cannes. (A member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Oldman is now starring in the film, “Prick Up Your Ears,” about another controversial--and dead--English cult figure, playwright Joe Orton.)

American audiences will get their first look at the film in early October, when it plays the New York Film Festival.