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1917 (2019)

Gimmick films are a pain in the ass, because the gimmickry that frames the production ultimately suffocates their effectiveness. Think of Robert Montgomery’s “The Lady in the Lake” with klutzy use of the camera as the narrator’s POV, the Ray Milland thriller “The Thief” that struggled without spoken dialogue or Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” and “Manderley” with their irritating bare-bones black-box theater settings – the respective gimmicks brought more damage than enhancement to these works.
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Road to Perdition (2002) (DVD)

perdition-splshAdapted from the graphic novel and based on a true story of the Sullivan family in the early thirties who are all tight knit with a rich old man named John Rooney whose known Mike Sullivan, the head of the Sullivan family since he was a child and raised him. Mike’s kids Peter and Michael (Tyler Hoechlin) soon become curious of Mike’s job. One night, young Michael follows his father on one of his “missions” and learns the gruesome secret of his job. In an attempt to protect his son from being hunted by a vicious assassin named McGuire, he sets out on the road with his son to search for salvation and dodge death.

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