Dominik’s outstanding KILLING THEM SOFTLY has the rigor and poise of the great American crime pictures of the 1970s. It is a loose adaptation of George V Higgins’ 1974 crime novel Cogan’s Trade, relocated from Boston to New Orleans, 2008, a city bludgeoned by Hurricane Katrina and sucker-punched by the Great Recession. In almost every scene, televisions blare with Obama’s Presidential campaign promises, but the story that unfolds gives the lie to his hopeful rhetoric.

Brad Pitt plays Jackie Cogan, a hired killer paid to clean up the aftermath of a heist on a mob-controlled poker game by two weaselly wannabes on the make (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn). His modus operandi is stealth: "I like to kill them softly, at a distance," he explains, although needless to say, things don't pan out entirely in accordance with his wishes. He is assisted by Mickey (James Gandolfini), a monstrous backup assassin who looks as if he should be living under a bridge, eating goats.

Dominik shoots the action in a grimy shallow focus, as if the entire nation is cloaked in a miasma of atomised filth, and his screenplay is tough as beaten steel and shot through with pessimistic, even nihilistic humour: Pitt’s electrifying final speech is worth the price of admission alone. The political and economic context is laid on thick, but in a way that future proofs the film for audiences in ten, 20, even 50 years. This is only Dominik’s third film after "Chopper" and "The Assassination of Jesse James", but it has the lines and contours of a classic.


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