The Place Beyond the Pines Review

Three stories run in sequence here, each one handing the film to the next and refusing to look back, which is either the boldest structural gamble of Derek Cianfrance's career or a slow leak. The opening shot earns the gamble, an unbroken walk behind Ryan Gosling's bleached, tattooed carnival rider from his trailer through the fairground crowd and into the steel globe where three motorcycles circle at speed.

Sean Bobbitt shoots the robberies from inside Luke's helmet and the upstate New York woods in a damp, unglamorous grey. Gosling plays Luke as a man with no vocabulary for what he wants, all twitch and sudden violence, and Ben Mendelsohn gives the film its warmth as the mechanic who talks him into crime. Bradley Cooper's segment, in which a rookie cop discovers his department is rotten and turns that discovery into a career, contains the sharpest writing in the picture, and Ray Liotta is genuinely frightening in four scenes.

Then the third panel arrives, and Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen are asked to carry a thematic argument about fathers and sons that the first two hours have already made. The last forty minutes state aloud what the film had been trusting us to feel.