Out of the Furnace, Cinemas across London

American thriller Out of the Furnace is the second offering from writer-director Scott Cooper, whose debut film, Crazy Heart, was well received when it came out in 2009. It’s definitely a film to start getting excited about – not least because of an all-star cast that includes Christian Bale, Forest Whitaker, Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck and Zoe Saldana.  

The story follows Russell Baze (played by Bale), a Pennsylvania steelworker who is released from jail to discover that his younger brother Rodney (Affleck) has taken up bare-knuckle fighting and become involved in one of the most ruthless crime rings in the Northeast. When Rodney mysteriously disappears after getting into trouble with a dangerous fight-fixer (Harrelson), the police fail to solve the case, so Russell decides to take matters into his own hands to seek justice.  

Here is a film where, perhaps unusually in today’s cinema, the world of crime is displayed with grim, graphic, honesty and the gangster is a humourless, psychopathic thug, reminiscent of Anton Chigurth in the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men. Talking in a recent interview about the realistic nature of his character, Harrelson referenced director Cooper, explaining that “if you try doing something that’s fake, he will immediately pare it out… you can see, that’s one of the beautiful things about his films – every moment is true, there’s no fakery.”