Michael K. Williams – Chris Barsanti

My review of the movie Breaking originally ran earlier in the year after its Sundance premiere when it was still titled 892. It’s getting a limited release now and is worth seeking out, particularly for featuring one of the final performances from the late great Michael K. Williams.

You can read the review at Slant:

Abi Damaris Corbin’s terse and powerful Breaking falls snugly into the genre of film centered around hostage negotiations, but it extends past familiarity with the aim of satisfying more than our thirst for thrills. Based closely on a real incident from 2017, the film tells the story of Brian Brown-Easley (John Boyega), a Marine veteran suffering from PTSD who walked into a Wells Fargo bank in an Atlanta suburb and said he would detonate a bomb unless his demand was met. That demand would seem almost comically small in a fictional version of this story: $892 in disability payments that the Department of Veterans Affairs withheld from Easley, which he needed in order to pay off student debt. This is a man looking not to get rich or take revenge, but to get a little shred of his dignity back…

Here’s the trailer:

Mark Wahlberg in 'The Gambler' (Paramount Pictures) — Mark Wahlberg educates the youth in ‘The Gambler’ (Paramount Pictures)

In the newest film from William Monaghan, writer of The Departed, Mark Wahlberg plays a professor who’s burning the candle at both ends, what with all the late-night gambling, fooling around with students, and those loan sharks who keep dropping by.

The Gambler opened wide on Christmas Day as a curious piece of award-film counter-programming. My review is at Film Journal International:

In the world of The Gambler, a hyperactive head-scratcher of an addle-brained disaster, many things are possible. Compulsive gamblers can play hand after hand of blackjack where the cards magically fall their way. Mobsters freely dispense philosophical koans like beads thrown from a Mardi Gras float. Level-headed, beautiful blondes get weak at the knees at the approach of self-centered boors. Mark Wahlberg can play a novelist and professor of literature. The film’s sense of realism is, to put it mildly, elastic. Not that this would necessarily matter were the material at hand more compelling. But this is a pulp confection that never manages to commit to the ludicrousness of its central conceit and ends up shortchanging the entire enterprise…

Here’s the trailer:

Chris Barsanti

Tag: Michael K. Williams

Screening Room: ‘Breaking’

New in Theaters: ‘The Gambler’