Posts Tagged ‘Jennifer Jason Leigh’

Crime 101

Director: Bart Layton

Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Barry Keoghan, Halle Berry, Monica Barbaro, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Corey Hawkins, Tate Donovan

Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

American Animals director Bart Layton reunites with Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) along with Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo (Foxcatcher, Spotlight, Poor Things) and Oscar winner Halle Berry (Monsters Ball) in the twisty crime thriller Crime 101 set entirely in Los Angeles.

Layton makes the Los Angeles urban landscape with its infinite freeways, it’s glittering skyscrapers, it’s homeless and its fascinating characters almost another character in Crime 101.

Chris Hemsworth stars as the elusive jewel thief Mike who is trying to score a big heist and grab some walk away money as he reluctantly takes orders from his boss Money played by Oscar nominee Nick Nolte (The Prince of Tides, Affliction, Warrior).

Mike soon has competition in the form of the crazy bike riding violent criminal Omon who rips off a high end jewellery store in Santa Barbara. While Mike is trying to figure out his next move, he targets the 53 year old insurance executive Sharon brilliantly played with bitterness and grit by Halle Berry.

The reluctant hero Mike also falls in love with the down to earth Maya, a radiant performance by Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown) whose presence lights up the screen in contrast to the surliness of Mike’s character.

Mark Ruffalo is excellent as the well weathered LAPD detective Lou who is trying to identify the perpetrator behind the crime capers along the extensive 101 freeway.

With flashy film noir overtones, Crime 101 is a story about greed, desperation and redemption as writer and director Bart Layton creates a tapestry of morally dubious characters that all converge in a thrilling scene on the 10^th floor penthouse suite of the plush Beverly Wilshire Hotel in L. A.

The best scenes are between Halle Berry and Mark Ruffalo whose experience and skill as screen actors shine through.

Crime 101 is a clever and gripping crime drama set along the 101 freeway about thieves, dodgy policeman, ruthless billionaires and an insurance executive desperate to escape corporate misogyny while having access to valuable diamonds.

Director Bart Layton creates an adult thriller, stylish, sexy and intriguing expertly using a cast of multi-generational characters that are multifaceted, malicious and malleable.

Crime 101 gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10 and is recommended viewing for those that enjoy a film noir contemporary thriller set in Los Angeles. Worth watching for the incredible cast.

Kill Your Darlings

Director: John Krokidas
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Jack Huston, Michael C. Hall, Ben Foster, Elizabeth Olsen, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kyra Sedgwick

The Beat generations’ pivotal year at Columbia University in 1944 is the engrossing starting point for this literary murder story, Kill Your Darlings, featuring a superb performance by Dane DeHaan as the disturbed anarchist Lucien Carr who has been under the influence of David Kamerer played by Michael C. Hall of Dexter fame. Enter the freshman and aspiring poet Allen Ginsberg sensitively played by Daniel Radcliffe who has fled a disturbed domestic environment to attend Columbia University and study English Literature.

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Soon Ginsberg falls under the spell bounding attention of Carr and the two strike up an intensely homoerotic friendship and Carr introduces Ginsberg to William S. Buroughs wonderfully underplayed by an unrecognizable Ben Foster and Jack Kerouac, played by Jack Huston nephew of Hollywood stars Angelica and Danny Huston and grandson of legendary director John Huston.
Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac fueled by countless drugs, experimental sexuality and non-conformist attitudes attempt to liberate themselves from the pantheon of Victorian and pre-Modernist literature and invent a new type of distinctly American literary movement heavily influenced by the banned work of Henry Miller, The Tropic of Cancer along with D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover both of which was secured under lock and key in the stately Columbia Library.

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As the Second World War raged on across the Atlantic and many of their American countrymen were liberating a ruined Europe from the last throws of Fascism, The Beat Generation was germinating in the hallowed halls of Columbia University and the dive bars of jazzy Harlem. Naturally its every young man first response to rebel against society upon entering University and these four certainly do so in more ways than one, under the envious gaze of David Kamerer whose latent sexuality and jealousy threatens to destroy their unique vision that of a Libertine Circle inspired by the poetry of W. B. Yeats. Kill Your Darlings is heavy viewing and for those not familiar with the writers or works of the Beat Generation which blossomed in the 1950’s and was at the forefront to American counter-culture leading up to the youth revolt characterizing the 1960’s, should really avoid this film.

Kill Your Darlings refers to the breaking of all standard literary conventions like metre, narrative and plot development, something the Modernists like Yeats, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot started doing. Central to this literary world, where creativity is fueled by drugs in Williams S. Burroughs’s case (see The Naked Lunch), or sexuality in Ginsberg’s case or recklessness in the life of Jack Kerouac whose seminal work On The Road become the literary bible for the Beat Generation is the unusual story of Carr and his ambivalent and highly influential relationship with Ginsberg. This controversial and ultimately doomed relationship would eventually be the inspiration of Ginsberg’s famous poem Howl published in 1957  as he discovers his latent homosexuality along with his distinctive voice as one of America’s most influential poets.

De Haan and Radcliffe are brave, ferocious and sexy  in Kill Your Darlings and while the murder plot tends to be slightly laboured it is their relationship with each other and also with their parents which becomes the focal point of a fascinating study of rebellion, artistic integrity in the face of conventional criticism and more significantly sacrifice. Highly recommended viewing but definitely not aimed at a broad appeal.