The pattern of this Christmas season at the movies, at least in the prestige releases that I caught, seemed to be “films that aren’t quite as good as their leading male performer.” This was true of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, in which a beefed-up Bradley Cooper inhabited a legendary Iraq War marksman so effectively that you could almost forgive the movie’s reliance on war-movie cliché and rote homefront melodrama. It was also true to some extent of Ava DuVernay’s Selma, a very solid, somewhat overpraised civil-rights drama elevated above its conventionality by David Oyelowo’s richly magnetic turn as Martin Luther King Jr.
And it’s true, unfortunately, of the movie I was most eagerly anticipating: A Most Violent Year, J. C. Chandor’s chiaroscuro-rich drama about a would-be heating-oil tycoon in the crime-ridden New York of 1981, which reaches for greatness but doesn’t quite surround its leading man, Oscar Isaac, with the story that his riveting performance deserves.
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