During the violent 1980s, Oscar Isaac runs a New York heating oil company that he inherited from his corrupt father-in-law, fighting pressures from multiple fronts: his trucks are being robbed regularly, he’s struggling to complete a time-sensitive deal to buy a new property, and the District Attorney’s office is breathing down his neck on potential charges of price fixing, tax evasion, and other illegalities. Isaac plays a believably tortured hero against a cast that is almost universally less heroic and much more ruthless, including wife Jessica Chastain. It’s weirdly a very competent film, but also mostly forgotten by the time the credits roll. 

Told through parallel tales, Julie Christie travels to India guided by the letters of her great aunt Greta Scacchi written almost 50 years earlier. I’ve long wished to visit India and this Merchant-Ivory production makes it both more gorgeous and more foreboding to the novice traveler. I far preferred the earlier story though the obvious similarities between the two makes for interesting comparing and contrasting. Aside from what I’ve gleaned from movies, I don’t know a lot about the British Raj and this provides a window into its heyday and its aftereffects.

In this simplistic view of Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, childhood friends Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier are forced onto opposite sides of the conflict. While I love both of the actors and neither of them are bad here, the film does not make best usage of their talents nor do I think their chemistry comes together in ways to enhance the weak story. I respect that the film tries to present both sides of the rebellion, but it might have been a case of being made too soon as events were still unfolding when the film was made and in modern times especially, it seems to lean a little too heavily onto the side of the colonialists.

Newly arrived in New York, army deserter John Cassavetes finds work as a longshoreman where he is befriended by supervisor Sidney Poitier drawing the ire of racist bully Jack Warden. The interracial friendship between Cassavetes and Poitier is a lovely thing to behold as is the relationship between Poitier and wife Ruby Dee. It’s the only movie of Poitier’s I’ve seen where a Bahamian accent pops out on occasion.