WASTELAND

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Rowan Athale’s debut feature is a British crime drama that wears its amateurishness on its sleeve. Conceived as a deconstructed heist movie, the over-worked plot dares its audience not to laugh out loud at its noticeably artificial underpinnings. You may feel like you’re holding the filmmaker’s hand in an adult/child relationship.

Luke Treadaway is woefully miscast as Harvey, a Yorkshire street tough fresh out of a yearlong prison term for a trumped-up drug-possession charge. Treadaway has a cutish boyish demeanor that undercuts his character’s potential for violent revenge that Harvey pursues against Roper (Neil Maskell), the scum responsible for putting him in the pokey. He’s just too squishy and soft.

Athale employs a clichéd exposition device to house his drama. Detective Inspector West (Timothy Spall) questions a bruised and battered Harvey about a recent robbery at a local club. Harvey narrates the flashback action that landed him in the dark room where his fate will be determined.

An assemble-the-team opening act introduces Harvey’s three working class buddies, whose poor command of grammar cues the audience as to where our sympathies ought to lie. Athale withholds key plot information in order to distract from ghost-in-the-machine plot revelations that arrive too late in the game.

“Wasteland” comes off like an exercise in misdirection. Rowan Athale hasn’t learned the important principle that Alfred Hitchcock faithfully honored about earning and paying off on the viewer’s trust.

“Wasteland” is a waste of time.

Not Rated. 106 mins.

GET CARTER — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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Mike Hodges said: “Films must have a soul and express the difficult truths of the human condition.” The British director's astute declaration rings expressively true in his 1971 debut.

Adapted from Ted Lewis’s novel "Jack's Return Home," “Get Carter” represents the apex of the British gangster genre for its realistically gritty tone, fetishized eroticism, and dynamic attention to details, which serve to delineate a sense of regional community and class structure in the city of Newcastle. Working class extras fill the movie. The result is a candid time capsule of life in Britain during the early '70s.

Michael Caine’s Jack Carter plays a ruthless London gangster motivated by the emotion with which he’s most comfortable: revenge. Carter has seen and done it all, more than a few times too. Carter's flawless fashion sense and tight-lipped demeanor disguise a wellspring of fury that knows few limits. The murder of Carter’s brother Frank— disguised as a suicide — prompts the gangster to visit his despised hometown in order to settle the score. “Who killed Frank?” is the mantra Carter repeats as he tears through town like the proverbial bull in a china shop.

We watch Jack make peace with his brother’s corpse, which waits in the family home for a lid to be screwed onto a tight-fitting casket. Hodges, the filmmaker, embraces the macabre nature of the situation without coloring it in any direction.

In Carter’s mind there’s nothing a little cash won’t fix. He has a habit of flashing a wad of bills, from which he peels off a few notes to satisfy those whose discomfort he causes by his presence. Carter imagines that a few banknotes will be enough to allow his niece Doreen (Petra Markham) to carry on without her father. But the hardened gangster’s mind changes when he watches an underground porno film featuring Doreen as its (abused) sex object. Caine’s understated acting style is exceptional during a scene where Carter watches the “roughie” porno movie to its conclusion. Carter’s list of people to kill — including both men and women — keeps getting longer.

Cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky’s use of long-lens compositions extends to aerial shots. Long shadows of noir-inflected mood lighting express Newcastle’s depressed economic social conditions. Suschitzky’s background in documentary filmmaking contributes to a sense of doomed urgency. Newcastle’s claustrophobic architecture of compressed houses adds to the feeling of trapped anxiety.

As the story unfolds, a subtle transition occurs in the relationship between the audience and the anti-hero to whom we devote our subjective attention. Jack Carter, it turns out, is the real villain who must be stopped.

Rated R. 112 mins.

BRIGHTON ROCK

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England's 1964 mods-and-rockers-era (the scene depicted in The Who's "Quadrophenia") comes under a noirish light in writer-turned-director Rowan Joffe's moody filmic adaptation of Graham Greene's 1938 novel.

Sam Riley ("Control") plays 17-year-old gangster Pinkie Brown, the same character Richard Attenborough played in John Boulting's 1947 original film version of the same story. Stoic Pinkie is forced to reevaluate his place on the lower rungs of gangland after his criminal mentor Kite (Geoff Bell) is murdered on a dark street by a rival gang. Ordered by his crew to put some fear into the gangster who killed Kite, Pinkie's initial tentative effort earns him a nasty scar on his otherwise unblemished cheek. Riley's Pinkie is a tortured anti-hero who draws you into liking him regardless of his despicable nature.

On Brighton’s famous pier Pinkie is photographed with his soon-to-be-victim and a young woman named Rose (Andrea Riseborough). Rose is the only witness who could potentially finger Pinkie as the person last seen with the man escorts under the pier. Pinkie sizes up the homely Rose as a submissive girl he can best control through seduction.

The film’s centerpiece of character discovery comes during an unforgettable scene wherein Pinkie makes a recording for Rose. He stands inside a coin-operated booth speaking a truth that Rose can only guess at as she peers in through a window, unable to hear Pinkie’s testimonial. Misplaced love never seemed so tragic.

Joffe makes the most of Brighton’s overcast setting to give a communal sense of the culture's compressed social structure. Although meticulously filmed in color by cinematographer John Mathieson (“Gladiator”), the film feels like you're watching a black-and-white movie made at the end of the ‘50s. The audience gets a visceral impression of the economic depression and psychological tenor of the time and place.

Helen Mirren draws on her experience to bring colors of emotion as Ida, the owner of an elegant teahouse. Ida sees through Pinkie's romantic handling of Rose, who works for her as a waitress. A soft-peddled romance between Mirren and the ever-enjoyable John Hurt lends a grace note of kindness to a character study of a young man incapable of love.

Not Rated. 111 mins.