The Good Lie follows a small of a group of Sudanese refugees and their eventual relocation to the U.S. The film starts strong, dropping us in a small village in Southern Sudan at the outset of the second Sudanese Civil War. Soldiers massacre the village, killing all but a few children who managed to stay hidden. This begins a 1,000-mile trek southwest to Kenya, where they have been told they may find asylum. Starving, sick and dehydrated, the children narrowly avoid capture and murder numerous times, finally making it to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. The young boys displaced/orphaned by the conflict became know as the “Lost Boys of Sudan.”

The film shifts gears at this point, basically turning into Coming to America but without Darth Vader and Arsenio Hall. The kids are grown, and granted asylum in the U.S. We get some typical fish out of water, Borat-style cultural differences played for a few laughs, but this is where the narrative starts to fall apart. In order to appeal to U.S. audiences, we need a white lead, so we get Reese Witherspoon as the tough employment agency counselor. Maybe seeing the suffering of refugees will make her take stock of her own life, and she will form a bond with these strong, noble people. Maybe we've seen this subplot a 100 times before, and maybe we no longer care. There is little conflict moving the story forward after the first act with the hardest part of the refugee's lives behind them. A story about refugees adjusting to life as lower working class citizens in Kansas City, Missouri is less than compelling.

The Good Lie is a fictional story, and suffers for being less interesting than the actors' real life experiences (minus Reese Witherspoon.) Take the actor that played Paul (Emmanuel Jal), for example. At the age of 11 he was recruited by the Sudan People's Liberation Army and brought to secret military camps disguised as schools. When the fighting started, he was saved from the conflict by a British aid worker, Emma McCune, and he attended school in Nairobi. A few months later, McCune is killed in a suspicious accident, and Jal is forced to live in the slums. He finds hip hop and goes on to be a successful performer, activist, speaker and actor. In 2008, a documentary was released about his life entitled War Child.

Ger Duany, the actor playing Jeremiah, was also conscripted into service during the war. He managed to flee on his own to Kenya, traveling over 1,000 miles on foot. He was granted refuge in the U.S. at the age of 16. He began playing basketball and excelled at the sport enough to get a college scholarship. An injury forced him to take a year off, during which he was cast in I Heart Huckabees. This launched a modeling and acting career, as well as a friendship with David O. Russell, the director of Huckabees, and Mark Wahlberg.

Not only are the lives of the actors more interesting than the film, the story of how the film eventually got made is one of rejection, luck, circumstance and perseverance. After being green-lit, the project lingered in Hollywood limbo. The original writer, Margret Nagel, was so intent on making the film she optioned the script back. While searching for other work, Nagel had submitted the script as a writing sample to another studio. Turns out that studio was run by Molly Smith, whose family had taken in one of the Lost Boys of Sudan in 2001, so she had a personal connection with the material and agreed to finance the project.

Clearly the writers and eventual producers of The Good Lie were very passionate about the film and the children who had to endure the hardships caused by the war. So much so that they set up a charity to help those children. The Good Lie Fund will help children living in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

The Good Lie is surrounded by remarkable and compelling stories: the real conflict it depicts, the actors who suffered through that hardship and the producers who are so dedicated to helping victims of that terrible violence they founded a charity to do just that. It's just unfortunate that the film itself isn't as interesting as the people who made it.

—Eric Harrelson

It can be ugly business tying up loose ends. Not necessarily limited to crimes and cover-ups, loose ends linger in the abstract, the frayed edges of our psyche years after deeds, or misdeeds, done. The Drop, director Michael Roskam (Bullhead) and writer Dennis Lehane’s (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone) new film, descends into the quiet, vicious heart of men desperately tying knot after knot into their lives.

Built on a spare cast, low stakes, and stunning performances, The Drop manages what thrillers so seldom accomplish, sustained poise. To say the stakes are low isn't to imply the story lacks gravity. The writing and narrative structure are taut to the point of waterproof. Instead, the stakes are low in the Marge Gunderson, “And for what? For a little bit of money,” sort of way.

There will be plenty of readings reducing this picture to rising action, ‘twist,’ and denouement. Sure, there are some wrinkles on the back end, but to cite them as the film's locus undermines The Drop’s sophisticated slow burn. Meted out in a long, slow sizzle, when the big reveal arrives, I think most will have some sense it was coming. The sickly sweet effectiveness of the big moment isn’t the ‘surprise’ itself, but that it’s thematically proportional to the grinding path down which the film has led us.

The Drop is an uncomplicated, gritty story, and the film’s crowning achievement is a foundational simplicity. An elementary principle so elusive it has broken the back of countless thrillers: nothing is left to coincidence. I can’t begin to expand on how admirable this truly is, and how seemingly difficult it is to pull off. There are no overheard conversations, no stumbled upon evidence, no wrong/right place at the wrong/right time moments, and it’s glorious.

It may seem ridiculous to dole out such heavy praise for what should be a modest feat, but coincidence is a curse on the genre. It’s difficult to stack such sprawling storylines together without requiring some coincidence as connective tissue, but Lehane doesn't settle. Instead, he takes his stable of sociopaths, winds them up, and lets them play off each other on a tragic march to oblivion. All the parts make sense, no one is allowed to be too cool or sexy, and everything—for once—happens for a reason.

At the center of all of this is Bob Saginowski as played by Tom Hardy in a powerful, absorbing turn. Bob’s most impressive aspect? He kind of sucks. For sure at first. It would be great if Bob was bad or unlikable, but he’s just a bumbler and naïve to the point of contempt. In fact, the film as a whole gets off to a shaky start. But as with everything The Drop, nothing is left to coincidence.

James Gandolfini in his final film as Cousin Marv, the never-quite-made made man. Noomi Rapace as the waitress with scars and scar tissue. Matthias Schoenarts as the distant, chilling neighborhood reprobate Eric Deeds. Chechen mobsters. It takes several disparate threads to make a loose end, but none serve the film quite as well as Bob and his newly adopted dog Rocco. Roskam examines their budding relationship with an astute tenderness. As a result of his delicate touch, Rocco emerges as an important emotional backdrop while working his way into the center of the maelstrom.

The Drop certainly employs its fair share of crime thriller familiarities. The grab bag of voice over narration, struggles with faith, petty criminals, and explosive violence are all present in various capacities. But the strength of the picture lies in Roskam and Lehane’s unflinching plainness. Our denizens are unglamorous, their world is brutish. We’re never asked to make a leap into improbability, and the smallness of ends to serve, the savagery of violence, these things are never more potent than when planted in reality.

An overall superb effort, my only quibble is the afterthought of an ending. The final scene pretty roundly betrays the ingrained tone, but it's not enough of an offense to upend otherwise excellent work. Not quite a prestige picture, but far too good for an end-of-summer throw away, The Drop very well might be one of the better efforts of 2014. A tight film with ragged people—who in fact are people--The Drop knows what ultimately Bob knows: our lot is little more than a series of loose ends, and they’re tied off in one way, and one way only. 

--Monte Monreal