RSS Feed

The title character of Joseph Cedar’s surprisingly entertaining and poignant film calls himself “a consultant” at one point. This isn’t so much a lie as a misleading statement. Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere) is really an operator, a promoter of sometimes dubious financial or political deals, an arranger. One prominent reviewer has called him a macher—a big shot in Yiddish—but this is something of an exaggeration. He’s more a wanna-be macher.

In the early 1990s, when it first opened, Joe Marcella’s club was an island: It was the only nightclub downtown—the only nightclub in Western New York, really. It was the only place to dance late at night. It was one of the few places in town where straight and queer culture intersected every weekend night, late at night, with a chaser of drag queens and kings. 

Iraq, 2007. The war is over—President Bush has declared victory and rebuilding is underway. This is not much comfort to Staff Sergeant Matthews (John Cena) and Sergeant Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) as we meet them, exhausted after having spent 20 hours in hiding at a construction site. Their mission is to wait for the sniper responsible for the corpses littering the area to come out so they can capture or kill him.