"Sentimiental value? I've herd of dat."

Viggo Mortensen gives one of his best performances and gives life to one of the most enjoyable to watch characters, sporting an incredibly believable Eastern European accent. His Nikolai Luzhin is a serious candidate for the most bad-ass driver in a movie; that's right Gosling, you're done! Nikolai is a very mysterious person who serves as a chauffeur (among other things) for Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a vor in the London-based Russian mafia. After a young girl, exhausted and injected with heroine, dies while giving birth, midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) takes her diary. This diary leads Anna to a restaurant owned by Semyon, linking the girl's death to the criminal organization.

If there's one thing…

Should be completely impersonal, but it's not. Should be a minor work, but it's not. Should be shown in film schools - for students to see how to take on a project completely for hire and make it completely theirs. All the tropes are there somehow - body horror disguised as gory action scene for example - but also families, offices and social networks, how those networks define characters and in reverse how character definition can be completely deceiving. But that's just the surface: if a viewer is aware of the central twist late in the movie (the best films get even better on repeat viewings) the film shifts from being the ultimate modern-noir genre flex to continuing Cronenberg's fascination…

Eastern Promises is a criminally underrated film which i personally think should be mentioned more when talking about crime/gangster films. Not only is it a great crime film, it is also a great character study.

Cronenbergs vision of a grimy London is great, this isn't a glossy gangster film like Goodfellas or The Godfather. All of these locations are dirty and really add to the atmosphere of the film.

All of the cast give good performances, but Viggo shines here. Brooding and Dangerous, he steals every scene that hes in. During one of the special features, Viggo states he travelled to Russia to research the part! Now thats dedication!

This is probably one of the first films to take at…

I must now watch this man’s (Viggo Mortensen’s) entire filmography.

I don’t mean to oversell this movie. I was struggling between a 3.5 and 4. There were a couple important elements that gave that last push to a 4. I’d known about this movie for years. I remember it being one of the first movies outside of the LOTR franchise that I knew Viggo Mortensen starred in. I remember him doing that finger-to-the-neck thing in commercials and being like, “Woa, that’s Aragorn!”. I finally got to it because I’d been watching The Green Book for the past couple weeks, just obsessed. Having seen that so many times recently helped show Viggo’s range for certain. 

Silliness aside, this movie avoided any…