Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) is finally back with another black comedy. This one, Seven Psychopaths, is about “a struggling screenwriter (Colin Farrell) who inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends (Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell) kidnap a gangster’s (Woody Harrelson) beloved Shih Tzu.” The premise is a little goofy, but with these three guys in the lead, how could I not be on board?
Abbie Cornish, Tom Waits, Olga Kurylenko and Zeljko Ivanek co-star in the October 12th release.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford director Andrew Dominik is back, once again with Brad Pitt in the leading role. In Killing Them Softly, an adaptation Cogan’s Trade by George V. Higgins, Pitt stars as a mob enforcer charged with tracking down a pair of small-time crooks (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) who’ve robbed a mob card game.
The film premiered at Cannes earlier this year, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or and scored some positive reviews.
Ray Liotta, Richard Jenkins, Sam Shepard and James Gandolfini co-star in the October 19th release.
Yeah, the US is late to this party. Easy Money is the American title for the 2010 Swedish thriller Snabba Cash, which finally makes it stateside in July. (Check your art hours theaters for showtimes, ’cause this isn’t going to make it into too many multiplexes. Here’s the synopsis.
Lower-class business student JW (Joel Kinnaman from AMC’s ‘The Killing’) falls in love with a sexy heiress while living a double life mingling with Stockholm’s wealthy elite. To keep up the facade of his lifestyle, he’s lured into a world of crime. Jorge is a petty fugitive on the run from both the police and Serbian mafia. He hopes that brokering a massive cocaine deal will allow him to escape for good. Mafia enforcer Mrado is on the hunt for Jorge, but his efforts are complicated when he’s unexpectedly saddled with caring for his young daughter. As JW’s journey ventures deeper into the dark world of organized crime, the fate of all three men becomes entangled and ends with a dramatic struggle for life and death.
A smash hit in its home country, the film already has at least one sequel in the can. You can check the trailer for Snabba Cash 2 out over at Twitch; it’s out in Sweden this August. The third film will complete the trilogy sometime next year. If this first one does well enough here, maybe the Weinsteins (or someone else) will bring the sequels over a little faster.
If you can’t stand reading movies, cross your fingers for Warner Brothers to exercise their remake option. It has Zac Efron attached!
Ruben Fleischer, the director of Zombieland and 30 Minutes or Less, has taken a break from comedies and made what looks like an absolutely kick-ass crime drama, chock full of really strong actors: Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Robert Patrick, Michael Peña, Giovanni Ribisi, Anthony Mackie, Emma Stone, and Sean Penn.
Here’s the synopsis:
Los Angeles, 1949. Ruthless, Brooklyn-born mob king Mickey Cohen (Penn) runs the show in this town, reaping the ill-gotten gains from the drugs, the guns, the prostitutes and–if he has his way–every wire bet placed west of Chicago. And he does it all with the protection of not only his own paid goons, but also the police and the politicians who are under his control. It’s enough to intimidate even the bravest, street-hardened cop…except, perhaps, for the small, secret crew of LAPD outsiders led by Sgt. John O’Mara (Brolin) and Jerry Wooters (Gosling), who come together to try to tear Cohen’s world apart. Gangster Squad is a colorful retelling of events surrounding the LAPD’s efforts to take back their nascent city from one of the most dangerous mafia bosses of all time.
I liked (not loved) Fleischers earlier films, but this looks fantastic. The tone, the look, and the cinematography are all much more distinctive than either of his previous efforts. The film was previously slated for October 12, 2012, but was bumped by Argo, Ben Affleck’s next flick. There’s no official release date at the moment.
