A Most Violent Year (2014)

11.35pm, Friday, BBC2

“I have always taken the path that is most right. The result is never in question for me. Just what path do you take to get there”

New York in the early 1980s is a tough place. When you’re a Latino immigrant trying to establish a business, it’s even tougher. And when that business is home-heating oil – and your rivals are essentially a cartel with a licence – well, life doesn’t get much tougher than that. Oscar Isaac is Abel Morales, a stand-up guy who is expanding his business by purchasing a prime piece of Noo Yawk waterfront. This oil terminal will give him direct access to overseas suppliers, cutting costs and reducing times. In order to purchase, he has to take out a large loan with a very tight window for paying back. Should he fail, the money, the property – and the business – are all gone. Meanwhile rival oil delivery companies are paying o goons to violently hijack Abel’s trucks, making his drivers nervous and cutting into already-thin margins. Abel wants to do it “straight”: he doesn’t want to be a gangster; he wants to achieve the American dream in the right way.

But that option is dwindling on an almost daily basis, as his own home is attacked and the lenders remind him that time is running out to pay. Meanwhile his Lady Macbeth-esque wife Anna (an alternatively alluring and terrifying Jessica Chastain) urges Abel to get the money from her crime-lord father: a last resort he’d sooner not visit.

JC Chandor’s drama captures the lth, dread, grimness (and seemingly ever-present cold) of 1981 New York so vividly, the viewer feels physically relocated there. And in Isaac he gets a compelling lead performance: Abel comes across as Michael Corleone with morals, a man determined to do whatever it takes for his family.