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Little Odessa More at IMDbPro »

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36 reviews in total

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9 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Raw, naked, haunting & cold., 23 February 2000
Author: Martin-165

I saw this movie at a quite low age, I consider it one of the films that evoked my passion for this art form. This film is very bare, very raw yet somehow harmonious, as well. The violence is very well depicted, in a very cold & frightful way. This is a film without any greater hope, without any greater optimism of our future. A rapid & haunting way of showing the true face and consequences of brutal violence. Intensively and artistically this film displays a chaotic & desperate family, a destiny very honest and very haunting. Cinematography is stunning, as is the environment, which very well defines the fundamental characteristics of this film, cold, naked, intense & raw. Great debut by the very promising James Gray.

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12 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
A superior drama, and a stunning debut for director James Gray., 7 July 2000

Author: Melville-7 from New York City

This is without a doubt the best debut by a filmmaker in the last decade. James Gray has directed with a sure hand, exerting amazing control over a wide variety of performers and flawlessly maintaining a haunting and menacing mood in his tale of crime and punishment among Russian immigrants in Brooklyn. Vanessa Redgrave is superb, as usual, and Maxmillian Schell has been kept from the unrestrained emotionalism to which he is prone (see JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG), so that he gives one of his very best performances in years. As for Edward Furlong and Tim Roth, both of whom can be very good or very bad, lets just say they haven't been this good before or since. Gray's command over such aspects of the film as pacing and visual style is impressive. The whole thing builds to a stunning climax.

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5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
The prodigal son returns., 9 November 2008

Author: lastliberal from United States

Writer/director James Gray's (We Own the Night) first film was critically acclaimed for it's cinematography and for performances by Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell. It is not an action film, even though the main character is a hit-man. It is a drama about family and shame.

Mr. Orange, Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, The Incredible Hulk) plays a son who has been disowned for bringing shame on the family by his behavior. He returns to Brighton Beach to do a job, and reunites with his family as his mother lays dying. He also reunited with Moira Kelly, much to the delight of movie viewers.

About the only one happy to see him was his younger brother Rueban, played by Edward Furlong (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Pecker). Well, mom was happy, but moms are always happy no matter how bad their children are - trust me on that.

Violence was at a minimum for a Russian Mafia/hit-man picture, and the focus was on the family. Maximilian Schell was excellent as the father that made piece just for a moment to allow Redgrave to see her son.

Gray's first film has nuance and subtlety not often seen in a film featuring the mafia.

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9 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
Where is James Gray now?, 19 June 2000

Author: RJC-4 from USA

A stunning debut by this young writer-director -- Dostoyevskian themes, an exact sense of place, and a lyricism touched by few of his peers. And now six years' wait!

While most U.S. indie filmmakers spent the 1990s studiously copying Tarantino, Gray in this overlooked gem created something entirely different: a character study of tragedy among the unhip and uncool. Torn by illness and the return of a prodigal son, a Russian immigrant family in New York tries to outlast the omens promising its destruction. The film owes something to Coppola, but you might feel the presence of Bergman, too. Unsentimental, unsparing, with brilliant performances by the principal cast. A must see.

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6 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
great for movie fans, but not for the popcorn-munching masses., 24 April 2003
Author: bampf from dublin, ireland

this film totally transcends its derivative storyline and machismo-charged genre. avoiding predictable characterisation (which some of the previous commentators seem to desire)and melodrama, the film may seem (and is at least visually) cold, but its warmth is built through nuance, not cliche. Great soundtrack too, with Arvo Part.

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3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Best I've seen Roth do, 9 March 2007

Author: smatysia (feldene@comcast.net) from Houston

I enjoyed the movie. Tim Roth, who is apparently British, sounded to me (a Texan) as a perfect second-generation Russian Jew. He was so coldly efficient in this character that I did not even recognize him as the hapless robber in Pulp Fiction. Kudos also to Moira Kelly, Edward Furlong, and Maximilian Schell. Good direction and photography. The use of the Russian choral music throughout set the mood on medium-creepy, even when that was the only clue. I've never been to Brighton Beach, or even Brooklyn, but the film really brought home the gritty reality of that immigrant community. (I really just mean the day-to-day atmosphere of the place, not the mobster story plastered on it.) Worth checking out if you don't mind a slower, more cerebral sort of hit man movie.

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5 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Remarkable, picaresque immigrant threnody, 27 November 2008

Author: Framescourer from London, UK

When I saw this film I was a bit bored - after all, the chief protagonist is supposed to be a hit-man, a dramatic role if ever there was one. At the same time I found myself pinned to the screen, watching an extraordinary roll-call of performance from three generations of first-class screen actors. It is a great shame that the plot is so makeshift, so flaky.

Roth plays a prodigal hit-man, Joshua, who returns to the town of the title for a contract against his instinct. None of the characters, largely all suffering old, unresolved antagonisms, can help themselves but be drawn to one another on his return, combustibly, tearfully but inevitably. Edward Furlong, a truly exceptional actor in every film in which I've seen him is heartbreaking here. Roth is an empty, jittery presence and the stymied reconciliation with his mother is desperate; Vanessa Redgrave is too much actually, but perhaps it's appropriate given that she is dying. It's too miserable in the end. 5/10

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Chilled me...literally, 19 December 1998
Author: (cjshan@concentric.net) from Peoria, IL

The thing I remember that most impressed me about Little Odessa was how director James Gray actually made me feel cold. There are a lot of exteriors that show a frozen, snow covered New York, but the whole thing is so wonderfully photographed that it actually made me feel chilled. The story is above average and Tim Roth is starting to run the risk of stereotyping himself into these kinds of violent characters...but this film will always remain one of my favorites because the simple look of the film affected me.

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3 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
A better film than some may think, 9 June 2004
Author: LatigoMeans from Harrisburg, PA

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

*** SPOILERS*****

I enjoyed this film primarily because of Tim Roth, Max Schell and the location... Brighton Beach, Brooklyn... the "Little Odessa" of the title. Russian immigrants have made this part of Brooklyn their own over the years... both good and bad Russian immigrants. Such is life.

Roth's need for a family re-connect drives him to put himself at risk as he assumes a murder contract in the "old neighborhood," a place his past has made very dangerous for him. This is not his first "contract" as he is a hired gun, hence his banishment from his family... more specifically his father - Max Schell.

Throughout the film his struggle to connect on any level with where he "comes from" is the underlying theme and ultimately the ruination of his family and love(?) - in parts natural (his Mother), associative (his Lover), accidental (his Brother) and finally purposeful (his Father). For it is his Father's body that he disposes of at the films conclusion (note the slippers and the weight of the body). His stare into space at the fade to black after remembering his last visit with his Mother and Brother, merely enforces the total loss of what he so wanted - to go home. A home now empty of all that mattered to him.

Anyway, that's the way I saw it.

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Another intense performance by Roth, 5 March 2012

Author: tieman64 from United Kingdom

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

James Gray's "Little Odessa" stars Tim Roth as Joshua Shapira, a hot-headed hit man working for the Russian mafia in Brooklyn. The film takes the format of a "prodigal son returns" narrative, the exiled Roth returning home to find that he is still unwanted by his family. They all abhor him, with the exception of little Reuben Shapira (Edward Furlong), who idolises his older brother. The film ends, as most "prodigal son" tales do, with Reuben dying, paying for his brother's sins.

"Little Odessa" was Gray's debut. It's a very good crime-film, well acted by the always electric Tim Roth, but the film's ethnic details are at times unconvincing and Gray falters in his final act with an obvious, overblown set piece in which little Reuben is accidentally gunned down.

Gray followed "Odessa" up with "The Yards", a crime drama set in the commuter rail yards of New York City. The film's structure is similar to "Odessa", and sees Mark Wahlberg playing an ex-convict who returns home after a short stint in prison. Wahlberg attempts to stay clean, to keep his nose out of crime, but is drawn back into the criminal underworld by a friend played by Joaquin Phoenix. The film retains the "brotherhood dynamics" of "Odessa", Wahlberg playing the "good son" (they're not related) who eventually turns on his suffocating sibling. Once again the film ends with a ridiculously over-the-top death scene. While "The Yards" has a certain, smothering pretentiousness about it, convinced about its own importance (it's lit like Rembrandt, street fights are filmed like Visconti's "Rocco and His Brothers" and it's reaching for the tone of Coppola's "The Godfather"), Gray nevertheless cooks up some wonderful strokes, like a beautifully sensitive welcome-home party, a wordless assassination attempt and a fine, aching performance by Wahlberg. It's a great mixed bag.

Gray then directed "We Own The Night", arguably his best crime picture. The "good brother/bad brother" motif returns, this time with Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix playing a pair of brothers on either side of the law. Phoenix's a perpetually high playboy who owns a nightclub frequented by drug-runners and mafia types, and Wahlberg's a straight-arrow cop trying to keep the streets clean. When the mafia unleashes an assassination campaign on local cops, Phoenix switches allegiances, goes undercover and attempts to take down the mob. There are touches of "Donnie Brasco", "Rush", "Point Break", "Serpico", "State of Grace", "Infernal Affairs" and every other "undercover cop" movie you can think of, but the film is beautifully lit, is atypically straight-faced and features a superb, rain-soaked car chase.

Some have suggested that Gray's trilogy should be celebrated for working in a "classical", almost conventionally Greek mould. That his conventionality suggests that all his characters are at the mercy of already in place contours, their fates forgone. This may be true, but the larger issue here is that Gray's crime trilogy highlights the way in which contemporary artists struggle to conceive of a response to post-modernism. The crime movies of, say, Tarantino and Scorsese, are unashamedly post-modern, toying with and regurgitating clichés from 1930s Warner machine gun operas and MGM crime flicks. They aren't about "crime", so much as they're pastiche jobs, jazzed up films about crime films. As a response to this aesthetic, artists who deem themselves "serious", who rightfully ask "what exactly comes after post-modernism?", tend to look backwards at what came before, as though modernism, by virtue of being modernism, is intrinsically "the solution". This leads to classically shot and written but wholly regressive fare like Gray's trilogy, which essentially unscrambles the world's Scorseses and Tarantinos and puts you right back in the 1930s. But you can't go backwards in this way; the audience will always be ten steps ahead of you and there will always be a huge chasm between your solemnity and the tired insights your film delivers. This is why true progressive works in the genre, fare like "The Wire", which actively attempts a cognitive mapping of both the world and crime, are neither modernist or postmodern, whilst possessing the vital traits of both. Philosophers have alternatively coined this new movement "neoprimitivism", "pseudomodernism", "participatism", "post-post modernism", but the one that seems to be sticking is "new modernism".

So on one hand "The Wire" is modernist in the sense that it rejects post-modern nihilism (nothing matters, there is no "truth", it's just a film) and posits a world in which it is possible and necessary for individuals to make value judgements, take stands, approach objectivity, and back facts up. It is modernist in its desires to "understand", "teach", "decipher" and "make better" the world, in its emphasis on culture, society, technology and politics, and in the way it actively co-opts postmodern tropes, bending them to suit its aims. On the other hand, the series is resolutely post-modern in that it is a "television series", has multiple authors, questions agency and has a tendency toward a certain fragmentation. But though it moves away from the dictatorship of the cinema screen, "The Wire's" television format allows for a scope that may be said to be authoritative precisely because it offers a consideration and weighing of "subjectivities" and multiple perspectives. In a way, if TV comes after film, "The Wire" comes before the internet. The internet, a medium that is slowly supplanting film's reign, is of course the ultimate postmodern device. It's a shared simulacrum - tactile and interactive - but is notable in the way it simultaneously creates a postmodern environment of junk, noise and static whilst fostering a new type of modernist artist akin to a decoder. As William Gibson said way back in the 80s, future great artist will function like search engines, mapping and making sense of the detritus. "The Wire" maps, Gray goes backwards to when there was less noise.

8/10 - Worth one viewing.

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