10 Most Underrated A24 Dramas, Ranked collider.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from collider.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
There s a kind of 1970s American movie that s catnip to directors who grew up in the 80s and 90s while watching that sort of movie on cable TV and home video. It s visually and thematically dark, and very male. It has Rembrandt lighting and a palette dominated by paper-bag brown, burnt yellow, leprous emerald, and dirty cream. There s talk of honor and integrity and tradition, of old ways passing and a meaner, pettier, more chaotic, new way taking its place. It is an organized crime film, or a family drama, or a big city nightmare, or all three things at once. Nobody in it is conventionally likable. The hero, despite a certain reticence about selling what s left of his soul, soon figures out that to get ahead in this world, you have to be cold and calculating, and divest yourself of illusions. A Most Violent Year, a 1981 New York period piece written and directed by J.C. Chandor ( All is Lost, Margin Call ), is that kind of movie. Oh, boy, is it that kind of movie. It s quite