Green Room is gut-wrenching, sometimes literally

 

Blue Ruin, Green Room. 

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is certainly not a director afraid to deal in primal colors: the bright green woodlands of Oregon into which down-on-their-luck punk band The Ain’t Rights stray, playing an impromptu gig to an audience of neo-Nazis; the visceral red of the horrific gore that results when band member Pat (an endearingly mumbly Anton Yelchin) stumbles upon a murder.…

Joe ties Nicolas Cage to the stake and prods a great performance out of him

 

Nicholas Cage is a visionary; he strides boundaries.

Few can claim a filmography as eclectic as his: from Rumble Fish to Vampires Kiss, through Con Air and Face/Off, Adaptation and Lord of War, to Ghost Rider, Kick-Ass, and now Joe.

Out of the Furnace shows us the crucible of the impoverished Mid-Atlantic US

 

Above a dying mining town somewhere in the Rust Belt of the United States, one of the most talented actors of his generation, bearded and disheveled, pauses with a rifle to take a shot.

A deer is in his scopes.