Revanche (2008)

"I love soulful noirs, and this slow-burn Austrian crime thriller is one of my faves of the new millennium. It’s as if Bergman made a movie about cops and robbers. Austrian director Götz Spielmann gets incredible naturalistic performances, and the storytelling has some real breathing space, which is rare in crime thrillers. (For another soulful Criterion crime pic, give The Hit a look-see.) What I love most about Revanche is this narrative magic trick it pulls. You think it’s going to be a relatively conventional story about a robbery that goes off the rails and criminal-code revenge. But instead it turns into this deep exploration about the intersection of people and the happenstances that lead us down surprising paths in our lives (a theme that I explored in my documentary Magical Universe. Find it!). Like the best noirs, the crime plot is just the Trojan horse that takes you into a profound story about choice and consequence. Before you even know it, Revanche has morphed into something like a Kieślowski film, and it suddenly knocks you on the floor and leaves you in a heap."

"This film caught me by surprise. It’s one of those films that you can’t stop thinking about. I went on a whim to see it at Anthology Film Archives in New York, not knowing anything about it. It floored me"