Eastern Promises

As I'm getting ready to leave L.A., I cannot but make time to watch one last movie here, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. It's a masterfully made thriller about the intersection of a half-British-Russian midwife played by Naomi Watts and Russian mobster/hitman played by Viggo Mortensen.

I've been a DCronenberg fan since I was a teenager watching his earlier horror works like Scanners, The  Fly and Dead Ringers. I think Crash is brilliant and remains one of my favorite films of his while I find Spider to be rigorous but slow.

Promises is sort of a companion piece to his previous successful feature A History of Violence. Both films deal with violence in a contemporary society in a realistic and dramatic way. While both pictures show that Cronenberg is a mature and masterful filmmaker who makes classy features with A-list actors, what I love most about Cronenberg is his gratitious and hyperbolic use of violence, which is both fabulous and uncompromisingly horror.

With really great performances through out, Eastern Promises is a picture not be missed by one of our most extraordinary directors in the world.