Little Odessa (1994)

User Rating:

6.7/10   

Director:

James Gray

Writer:

James Gray (writer)

Release Date:

19 May 1995 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Drama

Tagline:

Between good and evil and heaven and hell is...

Plot:

This film tells a bitter tale of a dysfunctional family. Joshua, a cold-blooded professional killer...

Plot Keywords:

Dysfunctional Family | Brother | Mother | Abusive Father | Hitman

Awards:

3 wins & 5 nominations

Cast

Tim Roth	...	Joshua Shapira
Edward Furlong	...	Reuben Shapira
Moira Kelly	...	Alla Shustervich
Vanessa Redgrave	...	Irina Shapira
Paul Guilfoyle	...	Boris Volkoff
Natalya Andrejchenko	...	Natasha
Maximilian Schell	...	Arkady Shapira
David Vadim	...	Sasha
Mina Bern	...	Grandma Tsilya
Boris McGiver	...	Ivan
Mohammed Ghaffari	...	Pahlevi
Michael Khmurov	...	Yuri
Dmitry Preyers	...	Victor
David Ross	...	Anatoly
Ron Brice	...	Man with one leg

Runtime:

98 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

USA:R | Iceland:16 | Australia:R | South Korea:18 | Finland:K-16 | France:-12 | Germany:16 (bw) | Netherlands:16 | Portugal:M/16 | Spain:18 | Sweden:15 | UK:15

Filming Locations:

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA

Company:

Fine Line Features

Trivia:

This film contains just 454 shots in about 92 minutes of action (i.e. excluding the credits). This equates to an average shot length of about 12 seconds. This is very long compared to the 3 - 6 second standard of most Hollywood films made in the 1990s.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: In the scenes where Mr. Schell is supposedly speaking Russian, his language is unintelligible beyond the simplest words.

Quotes:

Arkady Shapira: You know there is a saying: When a child is six years old, it says, "the father can do everything". When he's twelve, he says, "the father can almost do everything". When he's sixteen, he says, "the father is an idiot". When he's twenty-four, he says, "the father wasn't maybe such an idiot", and then, when he's forty, he says, "if I could only ask my father". But I'm afraid my sons will never ask themselves that.

Movie Connections:

Features Vengeance Valley (1951)

Great Camera-work; Heady Content

It's the camera-work which first impresses in this one. The shots are so well taken.

Roth is excellent, bordering on superb, and should win the Hugh Laurie Award for the best job done portraying (and sounding convincingly like) a 'north a-merican' by a Brit.

Are talents like Schell and Redgrave wasted? Hardly. More: their Russian is very good - something you wouldn't expect from a flick like this. Sometimes the language is almost overly simplistic but the accents are very good.

This is a taut thriller - a scary one - and there are scenes which may have you gasping because they're so stark. As in 'Casino was a Bugs Bunny movie'. Something like that. Is this good? That's another matter. A lot of this is lent by Roth's performance - he's a cold blooded killer and he plays it with more the poker face than Hopkins in Remains of the Day.

Denouement? Watch for it. When the movie's over you might miss the fact it's over. Is this a highly recommendable flick? Hard to say. Some excellent work here. But will you enjoy it? Benefit by it?

That's a much more difficult question.

PS. Hey IMDb! Stop correcting our spelling and giving us no chance to correct your incorrect corrections. Suggesting corrections is one thing; forcing them upon us is quite another.