USA | 2009
95 minutes
Director/Screenplay: Noah Buschel
Producers: Jesse Scolaro, Allen Bain, Lois Drabkin, Alex Estes
Photography: Ryan Samul
Editor: Mollie Goldstein
Production designer: Aleta Shaffer
Costume designer: Eden Miller
With: Michael Shannon, Frank Wood, Amy Ryan, Linda Emond, John Ventimiglia, Margaret Colin, Paul Sparks, Yul Vazquez, Paul Adelstein, Kate Arrington
Festivals: Sundance, Edinburgh, Sydney 2009
Censors rating tbc
A sure sense of 40s private-eye noir is applied to a resolutely contemporary tale to sharp effect.
“Down on his luck and holed up in a flea-pit hotel on the wrong side of the tracks, private detective John Roscow is woken from a gin-soaked stupor by an unexpected call. He begrudgingly accepts the assignment and starts to shadow a mysterious man travelling with a Mexican boy from Chicago to Los Angeles. Noah Buschel’s broody, jazz-inflected film noir ripples with melancholic wit, is rich with off-kilter characters and has a surprisingly resonant twist that locates it firmly in the present day... Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) is superb as the craggy detective – flawed and lovable, sure, but smouldering like the aftermath of a Richard Widmark outburst.” — Clare Stewart, Sydney Film Festival
“Oddly irresistible … A moody, modern-day noir about derailed lives and suppressed memories.” —Jeanette Catsoulis, NY Times
“It’s a current and universal parable on the very dark
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