Review of A Most Violent Year (2014) by Arafath I — 02 Jan 2015

Chandor's screenplay is perfect, and because of his remarkable skill with both actors and the physical delivery of cinema, this is for me an almost perfect film, a novelistic thriller of a movie that drops us right in the middle of the circumstances of these characters (and their time and place) and lets the back story fill in through the forward propulsion of the story.

We learn something about the characters in virtually every scene and every exchange of dialog. For instance, the looming figure of the Chastain character's father, who never appears in the film, plays a larger and larger role as we learn, bit by bit, the precise nature of this marriage and the business that forms the center of the action we experience.

Ditto with the complicated relationship between the players in the fuel oil business, the D.A,, the cops, and the mob. Chandor knows that he is playing in the fields so well plowed by The Godfather and its imitators, and his subtle, controlled and engrossing version of a crime drama, in a sense, trumps Coppola's earlier, groundbreaking work (something I never thought I would say).

This is an unmitigated triumph of cinema storytelling.