God's Pocket

Life in a 1980s blue-collar Philadelphia neighbourhood is the focus of this haphazard black comedy drama, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Pete Dexter and featuring one of the last ever performances by the ill-fated Philip Seymour Hoffman. Sadly, he's the best thing about it, playing Mickey, a mob-connected gambler and petty criminal whose obnoxious stepson Leon (Caleb Landry Jones) is killed on a construction site. The crew says it was an accident but Mickey's wife Jeanie (an underused Christina Hendricks) isn't so sure, and drives Mickey to play amateur detective. Disappointingly, this isn't the only strand of Mad Men star John Slattery's directorial debut, which also includes a woefully unsuccessful framing device featuring a drunken local newspaper columnist (Richard Jenkins) making moves on the traumatised Jeanie. Add a crooked florist, an Irish funeral director, some dire dark humour involving Leon's corpse and the whole is a fitfully amusing Our Town that struggles to come to any kind of meaningful conclusion.