Eastern Promises

Sometime after The Departed came out, I found myself wondering why we don't see more films about non-Italian organized crime, especially the Russian mob which seems to be the up and coming thing. Then I saw a preview for Eastern Promises, a film about Russian gangsters (and to some extent their Chechen rivals) in London, and I thought it looked terrible. But Chris Orr said it was good and I went to see it and . . . it's good! It contains a lot of what people liked about David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, but I thought it added a deeper sense of place and rootedness reminiscent of screenwriter Steven Knight's fantastic Dirty Pretty Things from a few years back.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/09/-em-eastern-promises-em/46297/