A good movie

In my opinion, James Gray is one of the most underrated director at work nowadays and I had been waiting 6 long years to finally watch his second directing feature. Once again, I was blown away by the directing. Indeed, he managed to make some really simple shots look pretty gorgeous and he has created a realistic, immersive and completely believable world full of small details. You could almost smell it. Furthermore, there was also an awesome cast (Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Charlize Theron, James Caan, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway) and they all delivered some very good performances. Unfortunately, I must say that the story was rather underwhelming. Indeed, they would like us to believe that it is some kind of grand ganster drama like 'The Godfather' but the plot never gets spellbinding enough. Another thing that bothered me was also the main charater. I mean, I don't blame Wahlberg as he gave a decent performance, but they obviously wanted us to care for him, to think that he was a nice guy, a poor lamb victim of the circumstances but it didn't really work for me. At the end, he goes all Serpico on this old colleagues and gets off the hook but, in fact, he did knock out a cop into a coma and it is not like anyone forced him to do all this illegal stuff, his uncle even proposed him a decent job but he refused to take it. To conclude, I thought it was rather flawed but thanks to the amazing directing and acting, I still enjoyed it and it is definitely worth a look.

7/10