Taking place in New York City during the winter of 1981, statistically one of the most violent years in the city's history, J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year tells the story of Abel Morales, a successful business man in charge of a major Heating Oil company. On the brink of a huge expansion for his company, repeated robberies of his Heating trucks begin to derail everything he has built. Desperate to keep his American dream alive, Abel sets out to find the men responsible for these attacks, which he presumes are coming from his competitors. J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year is an intricate character study that manages to keep its tension from start to finish. Mysterious and engaging, A Most Violent Year is fascinating film that basically draws major parallels between the business world and the gangster world. Played brilliantly by Oscar Issacs, Abel Morales is the type of character that is hard to decipher for much of the film. Is he a good man in a bad environment? or simply the best of a group of scoundrels? This idea is what makes A Most Violent Year so compelling, blurring the lines of between right and wrong as Abel tries to find opportunites to grow his business among the rampant violence and corruption that plague his environment. This isn't a film that takes the simple way out by simply showing the dark side of the American dream, it instead argues that the world we live in is much more complicated than that, offering a compelling portrait of a man being pulled in all directions.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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