Review of A Most Violent Year (2014) by Jon C — 31 Jan 2015

It's refreshing to see a movie that's very sure if itself. It's nice that a movie entitled A Most Violent Year doesn't need to be excessively violent, but only short bursts of chases or shootings to punctuate its characters lifestyles and threatened security.

It's reassuring to know that a filmmaker knows when to strike their work with the most engaging of scenes. Other than pacing issues, J.C. Chandor's third directorial effort is both stylish and gritty, shocking and subdued.

Now, we all know that Jessica Chastain is a terrific actress, but when you put her with former college co-student Oscar Isaac, it's almost like she makes magic. The two work great together and their offscreen relationship shows.

Isaac is better here than his work in Inside Llewyn Davis, and that's most in part to his character's development throughout the film. Like Chastain playing a Lady MacBeth-type character, Isaac knows the film's themes and knows how to convey them.

However, this isn't quite a great movie despite my aforementioned praises. Like most movies with a noticeable flaw, this movie is overlong and over-plotted. It's around the 75-minute mark or so that this lost its footing.

That's around when the second act should have ended, but it instead thickens plot points and makes things more complicated, neither in a quite entertaining manner. I would say that there were a good twenty minutes where I was bored; the rest of the time in question just wasn't quite that necessary.

A Most Violent Year isn't a movie that was "snubbed" at the Oscars, per se, other than Chastain's supporting work. It isn't as good as Chandor's previous movie All Is Lost, but its themes and questions that it raises are intriguing and its script is well written for about the first 60% of the movie's runtime.

7.8/10, solid, one thumb up, above average, etc.