Review of A Most Violent Year (2014) by Trailesque — 03 Dec 2017

There is not a lot of violence in this cool, frequently unaffecting drama. It is more a film about moral compromise than anything else, i.e. how do you succeed in a corrupt world without being at least a little corrupt yourself? Isaac plays Abel Morales, a young, up and coming businessman who wants to make it big, but has to get over a lot of hurdles to get there.

Chastain plays his hardcore, organized crime-connected wife. The Moraleses have some problems - they have one month to come up with the money to buy a property that will make them big players in the fuel oil industry, someone is ripping off their trucks and stealing their oil, the DA is getting started on a major investigation of their company (althou we never find out for what), one of their employees is a loose cannon, and an armed intruder is found messing around on their property.

There are some good scenes, like the truck chase sequence, but the characters and story did not draw me in.