Gus Van Sant directs Bill Skarsgård, Al Pacino and Colman Domingo in this true crime drama where a man swindled by his mortgage company takes the owner’s son hostage with a booby trapped shotgun.

I’ve read a few reviews dismissing this as gun-for-hire (the irony) work from Van Sant. The resting director came on board after Werner Herzog pulled out at the last minute. Gus actually makes a seductive fist of splicing dramatic shots, with recreated news footage and black and white stills to give the recreation a sense of temporal place. Skarsgård is fine as a twitchy, angry man who somehow blindly trusts the system to a fault. Maybe the more interesting part of the story is the court case that followed. More focus there, maybe as a framing device, might have tipped this over from curio to classic.

6

Perfect Double Bill: 30 Minutes Or Less (2011)

I write regular features about live comedy for British Comedy Guide here https://www.comedy.co.uk/people/bobby_carroll/features/ and my own Substack https://substack.com/@edinburghlaughterbulletin