Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 3 December

The Drop (Roskam, 2014)

Is there any­one among us that doesn’t miss James Gandolfini?

What a pre­pos­ter­ous tal­ent – and evid­ently an all-round good guy – taken from us far too young.

The Drop was his final role.

I reviewed it on 4 December 2014 for RNZ’s Nine to Noon show (along with Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and the fash­ion doc­u­ment­ary Advanced Style) so I thought I would tran­scribe that review for you here. Rookie mis­take as it turns out I only left myself about 20 seconds for The Drop which amoun­ted to this:

Poor old James Gandolfini’s last film, Tom Hardy, plays a bar­man in New York who gets embroiled into vari­ous mafia cor­rup­tion type efforts.

It’s a thrill­er writ­ten by Dennis Lehane, who is a fant­ast­ic writer and bril­liantly per­formed by all con­cerned Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Mattias Schoenerts.

Brilliant.

So there you have it, that’s the kind of deep ana­lys­is that gets you the big bucks on RNZ.

Where to watch The Drop

Aotearoa, Australia, Ireland, UK: Streaming on Disney+

Canada, India, USA: Digital rental