Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival (where it also received the vocal admiration of nouvelle vague legend Claude Chabrol), James Gray’s remarkably assured feature debut sees the director’s style and sensibility arriving fully formed: deeply personal, deathly serious, and exquisitely rendered. Set in the eponymous Russian-Jewish enclave in Brighton Beach, Little Odessa focuses on the fateful homecoming of Joshua Shapiro (Tim Roth), a mob hitman who returns to his old stomping grounds to take out his latest target.

While intending to lie low, Joshua finds himself inexorably drawn back to the family he left behind: his father (Maximilian Schell), who has disowned him; his gentle, terminally ill mother (Vanessa Redgrave); and his worshipful teenage brother (Edward Furlong). Inevitably, personal and professional spheres collide, placing Joshua and those he loves in grave danger.

Inaugurating Gray’s preoccupations with family and fate, Little Odessa serves as a premature rebuttal to the post-Tarantino irony that was then just beginning to put its stranglehold on American filmmaking. “[Roth’s] finest performance to date … James Gray, aged 25, directs this dark, spare piece — his first feature — as to the manor born” (Time Out).

Please note that this rare 35mm print will be presented with French subtitles.