We who review movies regularly know how to spot red flags, and not even Baruch Spinoza deploying all his view-from-nowhere skills could say Fresh Kills didn’t look like trouble. This is a mafia drama, the most played-out of all genres, particularly for independent films, and it was written and directed by an actor known mostly from cop shows. Lastly, it debuted a year ago at the Tribeca Film Festival , which from time to time does launch good projects, but also unleashes plenty of god-awful mafia dramas written and directed by people you know from cop shows.
But Fresh Kills proves we must always give everything a fair shake. Jennifer Esposito’s debut feature isn’t a mere “not bad"—it’s a stone-cold “this is great” success. The actress (from Blue Bloods , NCIS , and a hundred other things) is a major directing talent who, if the world were a righteous place, would have offers from every studio to create intelligent and finely observed movies for adults from now until the end of time.
She’s also in the damn thing, as the mother of two very different sisters (Emily Bader and Odessa A’zion) navigating their unusual living conditions from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Their environment is the rather dramatically named real neighborhood Fresh Kills (“kill” being Dutch for “stream”) in Staten Island. Thanks to The Sopranos , everyone knows about North Jersey Italian-American culture.
But more hardcore (even more than the Nassau/Suffolk county line.
