Subtitles:

English (SDH), Spanish, none

Extras:

Michael Shannon stars as notorious contract killer Richard Kuklinski in this biopic from director Ariel Vromen (Rx, Danika). To his loving wife Deborah (Winona Ryder) and their growing family, Kuklinski was a caring father. But he was also a man with a dark secret and an unusual talent for covering his tracks. For nearly three decades starting in the 1950s, the suburban family man worked as one of the Gambino crime family's chief executioners, earning the nickname "Iceman" for his use of freezers in obscuring the forensic details of his victim's deaths. By constantly varying his methods, Kuklinski made it virtually impossible for investigators to assemble an accurate profile of the killer credited with taking over 100 lives. A protégé of seasoned assassin Robert "Mister Softee" Pronge (Chris Evans), the elusive contract killer struggles to reconcile his relationship with his sociopathic brother Joseph (Stephen Dorff) while nurturing a close friendship with his Gambino contact Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta). Then, in 1986, an arrest brings Kuklinski's violent career to a sudden end.

In “The Iceman” Michael Shannon’s mesmerizing portrayal of Richard Kuklinski, a notorious contract killer, has the paradoxical quality, peculiar to many great screen performances, of being unreadable and transparent. You can’t really see through Richard, whose pale-blue eyes take in the world from a face as expressionless as a sphinx. But in its tiniest tremors you can sense explosive forces roiling below the mask and grasp the duality with a visceral feeling of dread. It is a performance that has the same life-or-death gravity Mr. Shannon brought to the role of a man driven half-mad by apocalyptic portents in “Take Shelter.”

Gary Tooze

August 14th, 2013