A neatly nasty cautionary tale about the dangers faced by the artist when he undertakes to speak for the common man. Richard Jenkins (Killing Them Softly) is spot-on as an old-school, Studs-Terkel style newspaper columnist drunk on the notion that his city is universally grateful to be immortalized in fishwrap. (He's also drunk on plain old alcohol.) When he starts poking around in the closed-lipped, close-knit neighborhood known as God's Pocket, he winds up getting more than the story, for good and ill. But first-time film director John Slattery is less assured when it comes to the story itself: the suspicious death of a junior sociopath (a chilling Caleb Landry Jones). Mom (Christina Hendricks) freaks out, and stepdad (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has to figure out how to pay for the funeral. It seems like Slattery is going for black comedy, but here and there he trips over his own empathy for the suffering souls onscreen. (2014) — Matthew Lickona