Pictureland

Often pulsing with a score of ominous, insistent electronica, Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes  seems an echo from the fictional side of the story telling divide opposite documentaries of tragic economic chicanery like Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room , Client 9 and Inside Job.  All are films, whether apparent truth or fiction, concerning themselves with the deregulation of the financial industry that found its most devastating expression in the Global Financial Crisis (the swath of destruction vast enough that we can now grant it capital letters, like a world war) of 2008 and beyond. We're not given a specific date when we're dropped into the midst of the action, the great reversal, taking place in the U.S economy, but the setting is Orlando Florida (with unrecognizable suburbs of New Orleans standing in).  What's clear is that the economic crisis, initiated largely by a multitude of doomed mortgages, is quickly fanning and settling like a gangrenous rot.  ...

Say hullo to my leetle...uh, kolace?  Michael Shannon looking not at all like Polish hitman and serial killer  Richard Kuklinski in T he Iceman.   If you've seen the poster for The Iceman, you might not recognize the film's star, Michael Shannon.  It looks as though he's been given the Scarface treatment:  hair darkened, slicked back, those formidable eyebrows run to jet as well as a particularly bushy and badass goatee.  Mr. Shannon's facial hair often grows more fearful and plentiful as the body count rises in The Iceman .  But it's not a Latin gangster he's playing in the film .  Shanon is actually depicting a man of Polish descent, serial killer and mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski, whose real body count will probably never be known with certainty, much as it might have ranged into triple figures. Just as the resemblance of actor to actual killer is slight, so does this version of Kuklinski's story constitute a more palatable distillat...

Through the vagaries of 21st century film distribution, I happened to see Mud at one of Chicago's god-forsaken multiplexes.  This occurred after the heavy bombardment in Dolby Digital sound of coming attractions for the likes of Iron Man 3 and Pacific Rim  practically shook the bones and before the more genteel trailers for Roadside Attractions - the company distributing Mud - followed:  a documentary from Sarah Polley; Joss Whedon's update of Much Ado About Nothing . With writer/director Jeff Nichol's Mud, we're dealing with something far more subtle than most of those thundering mainstream films.  And yet, there's no lack of story with Mud .  Over the course of his three features, Mr. Nichols has established himself as someone who seems more of a skilled writer that directs than a director who just insists on filming his own stories.  Not a bad thing at all.  So Mud is ground in specifics of character and place as any good writer would d...