Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Killer Inside Me (18s)

Sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) is a soft-spoken, well-mannered Southern gentleman as he patrols his small Texas town, but Lou is not all that he seems. Ordered to run Joyce (Jessica Alba), a local prostitute, out of town, Lou batters the woman to death, then shoots dead the man infatuated with her - even though Lou himself was having an affair with Joyce.
  Based on a Jim Thompson novel, The Killer Inside Me is told through Lou’s eyes, and features a voiceover from Affleck that offers a chilling insight into the banal evil of a man who is a homicidal psychotic. Affleck’s understated performance is perfectly pitched, creating a sympathetic portrayal of a character who is utterly repulsive - the scene in which Affleck beats Alba to a pulp is harrowing, even by contemporary cinema’s standards. And yet the audience can perfectly understand why Lou’s sweetheart, Amy (Kate Hudson), might fall for him: he is tender, intelligent and well-educated.
  The director, Michael Winterbottom, recreates the small-town Americana of the 1950s with an unerring eye, giving the movie a dreamy quality that regularly flips over into nightmare whenever the switch flips in Lou’s head. A good cast provides excellent support, with Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas, Simon Baker, Bill Pullman and Brent Briscoe all paying the price, in one form or another, for attempting to thwart Lou’s plans.
  Be warned that this is not one for the faint-hearted, as the violence has a perversely intimate quality to it that makes it utterly shocking. That said, as a crime thriller and a forensically telling psychological exploration of psychosis, The Killer Inside Me is a viscerally engaging experience. **** - Declan Burke

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Gone Baby Gone

Called in by the family of a missing girl to augment the official police investigation, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) use their experience of growing up in the area of Boston where Angela McCready (Madeline O’Brien) went missing to winkle out some leads. Soon they’re working as equals with the detectives assigned to the case by Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), but when one of those detectives is a self-confessed by-any-means-necessary rule-breaker like Detective Remy Bressant (Ed Harris), that’s not necessarily a cause for celebration. Drawn deeper and deeper into a web of drug-dealing, abduction and double-cross, at the heart of which lies the missing girl’s mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), Patrick and Angie find themselves compromised at every turn. Postponed on this side of the pond from its original release schedule last year as a result of the disappearance of Madeline McCann, Gone Baby Gone (based on the best-selling novel by Dennis Lehane) is a bleak and hard-hitting tale of moral corruption on the mean streets of Boston. Strong performances from an excellent cast give the story a gritty authenticity that is at times almost too real to bear, particularly in terms of the police department’s pessimistic outlook on the chances of finding young Angela. Casey Affleck, building on his superb turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is the star of the show, although Harris – who looks eerily like Dennis Hopper – matches him with a chilling portrayal of slow-burning intensity. Ben Affleck, who also co-adapted the novel, directs with no little style in his debut at the helm, slicing out the fat and leaving us with a lean, taut tale. By the finale the character of Patrick Kenzie is a little too squeaky-clean to ring entirely true, but this is a compelling and disturbing movie nonetheless. **** - Declan Burke

This review first appeared in TV Now! magazine