Ben Affleck‘s first time behind the camera as a director comes in this adaptation of a novel by Dennis Lehane in a screenplay he also wrote brings with it immense critical praise which is well-deserved. Casey Affleck plays Patrick Kenzie, a private detective familiar with the streets and neighborhoods of Boston, living with his girlfriend and partner Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan).

In Layer Cake, which is based upon a British novel of the same name, we get a rare peak into the British criminal underground through the eyes of a very successful cocaine trafficker who is never named, but is played by Daniel Craig.  He is well-educated, smart, respectful, and not greedy.  Having accumulated enough of a modest fortune for himself to live pleasurably he plans to leave the business while he is still ahead, but that all changes when his supplier Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) assigns him two very difficult tasks before he will be allowed to leave: find the whereabouts of a young woman named Charlie, the daughter of a powerful associate name Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon) and find a buyer for a massive amount of ecstasy pills which have recently been stolen in Amsterdam.

City of God (2002) (Cidade de Deus) is already quite a critically acclaimed film, but I had just recently finally seen the last five minutes and so felt it appropriate to weigh in both because I like to personally keep track of movies I see, it may help readers determine how much my tastes may match theirs, and as fun as it may be to think I may at some point actually have a following or something as a movie reviewer, I really just like doing it.

“Tsotsi” is urban slang for thug in Johannesburg, South Africa, which is where this movie is based.  It tells us a gripping story about life in the true poverty that may be found in the shantytowns of South Africa.  The Tsotsi/Thug to which the title refers is an anonymous black young adult who lives in a shanty in a densely built and very crowded shantytown outside Johannesburg. 

I was only fourteen when this was happening and my memory of the media coverage is certainly not exact, but it seems like Hotel Rwanda tells us an important story of an individual trying to make a difference in the face of hatred and genocide. One decade after the massive atrocity committed in Rwanda of the Hutus against the Tutsis, Don Cheadle portrays Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of a glamorous luxury hotel which he used to shelter thousands of Tutsis against the Hutu rebels including his wife and family.