Jack English/Studiocanal
MOVIE REVIEW
The Two Faces of January (2014)
Enough of author Patricia Highsmith’s intuition for the dire fallibility of menfolk lingers in “The Two Faces of January” to give the film a certain residual bite, despite the tendency of writer and director Hossein Amini to desiccate most of the juice out of everything. No surprise that the scriptwriter of “Drive” is prone to flat and emphatic point-making — although Mr. Amini handles his script with kid gloves compared to Nicolas Winding Refn‘s self-annihilating injection of TNT — but at least this gives more unhindered screen time to Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac, cutting a dash across early-1960s Athens and Crete in nice linen suits while coming to detest each other.