Lawless (2012)

Note: a slightly truncated version of this review first appeared on Kubrick on the Guillotine

Dir: John Hillcoat

Plot: Three moonshining brothers in 1920s Virginia find their activities disturbed by the arrival of a ruthless lawman determined to wipe them out.

Lawless isn't a very good name for a movie, is it? A bit generic. A better name for this would be The Beverly Killbillies. Excuse the corny wordplay, because it serves a higher purpose. Not only does it sum up the plot of the Nick Cave-penned bootlegging drama, it also sums up its fundamental flaw - it isn't sure whether it's a bloodsoaked thriller or a good ol' boy yuk-fest and it never tries probing deep enough to find out.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945)

(This review originally appeared on Kubrick On The Guillotine, a great film site that you should check out)

Dir.: Elia Kazan
Plot: A bright young girl comes of age in a turn-of-the-century Brooklyn tenement, witnessing the tensions and struggles of her family.

Rarely does a young director’s first feature film contain such striking beauty and power as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But then again, rarely is that director Elia Kazan. And the young auteur had hardly set himself an easy task: coming off the back of nothing more than a short film about coal mining in Tennessee, Kazan was to condense an enormously popular 500-page novel by Betty Smith into a 2-hour studio production. The result is an astonishingly assured mini-epic which dampened handkerchiefs across the nation, and launched Kazan into a career that would change American film.