Our "Alone for the Holidays" series concludes with our final episode of 2023, a discussion of Andrew Dominik's bleak 2012 crime drama KILLING THEM SOFTLY starring Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta and Richard Jenkins. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crises, KILLING THEM SOFTLY follows a pair of low-level criminals pulling an opportunistic heist, then switches to the hit man hired to control the fallout. Based on the novel Cogan's Trade by George V. Higgins, KILLING THEM SOFTLY was largely dismissed by audiences upon release as too downbeat, but it's an honest and exhilarating movie of big ideas, expressing with great efficiency and poetry what it means to be alone in America.
