The hero of J.C. Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year,” a heating-oil dealer played superbly by Oscar Isaac, thinks he’s an honest man. “I spent my whole life trying not to become a gangster,” Abel Morales says at a make-or-break moment in his life. He says this to his wife, Anna, who, as played with scuzzy verve by Jessica Chastain, has no illusions about her husband or what needs to be done. Mr. Chandor made an impressive debut with his 2011 film “Margin Call,” which studied the ethics of significant players at an investment bank in 2008, during the 24 hours before the crash. His new film, set in New York in 1981,...  The hero of J.C. Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year,” a heating-oil dealer played superbly by Oscar Isaac, thinks he’s an honest man. “I spent my whole life trying not to become a gangster,” Abel Morales says at a make-or-break moment in his life. He says this to his wife, Anna, who, as played with scuzzy verve by Jessica Chastain, has no illusions about her husband or what needs to be done. Mr. Chandor made an impressive debut with his 2011 film “Margin Call,” which studied the ethics of significant players at an investment bank in 2008, during the 24 hours before the crash. His new film, set in New York in 1981, focuses its ethical concerns on Abel, who is nothing if not ambitious. The film is ambitious too, and hugely accomplished; at the same time it’s self-serious, to a fault. Just as Abel walks a wavering line between probity and thievery, the drama wavers between authentic gravity and a deficit of energy.  That said, Mr. Chandor gives Mr. Isaac everything he needs for a tour de force performance, and the actor makes the most of what he gets. Abel isn’t a lovable figure, but he’s a fascinating one, a man of limited insight who has fought his way to precarious affluence. Now, faced with a criminal investigation and under siege from his competitors—under what amounts to terrorist attacks on his trucks and drivers—he has only a few days to come up with a million and a half dollars to pull off his crucial purchase of a fuel-oil depot in Brooklyn. In conveying Abel’s brooding attempts at self-scrutiny, Mr. Isaac recalls, without mimicry, the young Al Pacino. In revealing the anxiety and fear behind Abel’s polished exterior, he’s entirely original, a fine actor in the process of becoming a certified star.  One of the story’s main characters is New York at its grungy, graffiti-covered nadir, a city so dark in prospect and tone that the movie turns noir almost of its own accord. It’s also the city that Sidney Lumet enshrined in such classics as “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” This film doesn’t operate in that league, and doesn’t pretend to; it’s smaller in scale, and suffers from a silly ending. Still, “A Most Violent Year,” which comes only one year after Mr. Chandor’s sailboat saga “All Is Lost,” is another worthy feature from a filmmaker with a seemingly unlimited future. If only he goes easy on solemnity in the next one.  Oscar Isaac is the wayward troubadour of the title, living out his own ballad of love and loss. The film, written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, begins with Llewyn singing a three-minute song. The setting is the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village in 1961, just before the folk-music scene was transformed by the arrival of Bob Dylan. Elegiac and stirring in equal measure, the song sets the dominant tone of what follows, even if some of the plot’s twists and turns are very funny.  There’s a moment in J.C. Chandor’s debut feature when a young risk analyst spots a piece of data on his computer screen and realizes that it’s the financial equivalent of the asteroid headed for earth in “Armageddon.” The time is 2008, and the setting is a Manhattan investment bank that bears a more than passing resemblance to Lehman Brothers. Mr. Chandor’s debut feature is a shrewdly circumscribed chamber piece that’s chilling and enjoyable in unequal measure. Entertainment predominates, but entertainment with a well-honed edge.
Under threat from all sides, a fuel dealer closes in on the object of his soaring ambition; directed by J.C. Chandor, starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain