Rebel Ridge

As elementally satisfying as a great Western.

“Rebel Ridge” isn’t up there with Saulnier’s earlier films but it’s still something rare in the commercial movie landscape: A work of pure professionalism behind the camera and in front of it.

With a whip-smart plot, a strong lead in Aaron Pierre, and a standout villain in Don Johnson, director Jeremy Saulnier has done it again.

The film's hectically choreographed violence has less power than the characters' subtle yet precise glances of recognition or hostility or complicity. The movie's physicality, at its most vital, is infinitesimal.

Rebel Ridge is that rarest of things, an auteurist action thriller with brains and heart and guts, an electrifying and crowd-pleasing work of cinema, pulp art of the highest level.

The film runs out of momentum, finding itself ensnared in a needlessly complicated web of intrigue and administrative shenanigans.

As a cathartic high-octane revenge thriller, it is limp. As a character study, it is too tetchily schematic to offer more than ambling pleasures and as a cog in the wheel of law enforcement on screen it sounds a desultory conforming cry

If you are looking for a simple revenge film, Rebel Ridge is not the right tree to bark up. Smartly, it never allows us the stock happy endings we crave.

A fun, action packed and, yes, touching thriller with a standout performance from Aaron Pierre as Terry, a black man confronted by a sea of racist, small town cops as he tries to free his cousin and smash the corrupt stranglehold the law has on that town.

Like him, the movie will knock you out&#59; unlike him, it’ll be in a good way.