佛罗里达州的一个小镇上,Hillary Van Wetter(约翰·库萨克 John Cusack 饰)被指控谋杀了一个警察,被判处死刑。迈阿密时报的记者Ward Jansen(马修·麦康纳 Matthew McConaughey 饰)觉得事有蹊跷,Hillary可能不是真的凶手,便和从伦敦来的另一名记者,Yardley Acheman(大卫·奥伊罗 David Oyelowo 饰)对案件展开调查。Ward年轻的弟弟Jack Jansen(扎克·埃夫隆 Zac Efron饰),退役的游泳选手,则成为了他们的司机。Charlotte Bless(妮可·基德曼 Nicole Kidman饰)喜欢给监狱里的人写信,这一次,她爱上了Hillary,两人频繁通信。于是Ward和Yardley找到了Charlotte,让她协助调查。几人开始频繁地去监狱探访Hil...
The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich B?ll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert F?hmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation F?hmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.