Modern Westerns like No Country For Old Men meets a rural, low-key version of Heat in David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water. With its Texas setting and its equal time given to the crooks and the cops that are chasing them, Mackenzie's film, written by the increasingly impressive Taylor Sheridan, is buoyed along its fairly familiar path by a top-notch cast and a resonant backdrop of scheming bankers and post-industrial blight. A perfect fit for 2016, the film gives a voice to those who want to punch the powerful in the nose by any self-destructive means necessary.
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John Hillcoat has several feathers in his cap, particularly his two bleak masterpieces (The Proposition, The Road) and his rambunctious Prohibition tall tale (Lawless). That's a track record to recommend, but it all comes to a halt with Triple 9, Hillcoat's stultifying attempt to make a modern Heat. His earlier films never get anywhere near boring, but his latest is stuck in the quicksand of uninteresting characters and genre rehashes. Hillcoat has assembled an A-list cast to reprise tropes that were either created or better utilized in far superior films.
Johnny Depp does his heavy make-up thing in Scott Cooper's Black Mass, a crime drama about Boston's Whitey Bulger. Cooper, with the affecting Crazy Heart and the alienating Out of the Furnace under his belt, is leaning more into the Furnace side here, as Black Mass is competent but cold and mostly unmemorable. Bulger is an intriguing subject only for a person otherwise unfamiliar with how criminals operate in ethnic enclaves and are later represented in cinema.
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