The Two Faces of January (2014)
Directed by Hossein Amini
1962. A con artist, his wife, and a dangerous stranger are caught up in the murder of a private detective and are forced to try and escape Athens.
4 connections found
View:
4 films that influenced The Two Faces of January
What critics say influenced The Two Faces of January
For those unfamiliar, Highsmith created Tom Ripley and provided Alfred Hitchcock with the source material for “ Strangers on a Train .”
The three leads, Kirsten Dunst , Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac are all actors we admire, the director may be a first-timer in this role, but Hossein Amini is the high-profile screenwriter of “Drive” and “Snow White and the Hunstman” and, beyond that, it’s based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose books have previously yielded such films as “The Talented Mr Ripley,” “Strangers on a Train,” and the underseen “Ripley’s Game.”
With all due respect to admirers of Gone Girl, it takes a lot more than a psychotic wife framing her husband for murder and spitting in somebody's Mountain Dew to be compared to the work of the author of Strangers on a Train and the Ripley novels.
Hitch did a film from Highsmith's novel Strangers on a Train (1951).
Amini adapted his script from Patricia Highsmith’s little-known novel of the same name and, as Hitchcock did with Strangers on a Train, improved upon her story.
Watching the characters’ journey through the desert and back again brings to mind Antonioni’s The Passenger, even though the story threatens to fall back into that film’s languid pace as Amini and his editors struggle to keep the momentum going from time to time.
The Two Faces of January’s slow-burn pacing, mysterious characters, murky morality, and posh foreign setting align it with a certain strand of classical mystery probably best exemplified by Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and most recently by the complex Cold War espionage drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), a film with which this one shares three producers.
The Two Faces of January’s slow-burn pacing, mysterious characters, murky morality, and posh foreign setting align it with a certain strand of classical mystery probably best exemplified by Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and most recently by the complex Cold War espionage drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), a film with which this one shares three producers.