Recensioni de* critic*

Though the sudden shifts in tone were in Joe R. Lansdale's original crime novel, it's really the strength of Mickle and Damici's script that makes Cold in July lean and consistently tense rather than verbose and confusing. (Richard Kelly's disastrous 2006 film Southland Tales springs to mind as a classic example of what not to do when genre-bending.) Of course, this accomplishment is helped by fantastic performances from Hall, Shepard and Johnson.

Watching Cold in July unfold, I was continually reminded of work by two other artists: John Carpenter, the director of such horror and sci-fi classics as Halloween (1978) and They Live (1988), and Sam Shepard, the longtime actor and playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 drama Buried Child. This is a shotgun marriage, to be sure, but it works.

It is inherently disconnected movie, and it never holds together as a coherent narrative, but the individual pieces are down and dirty fun... After the monotone gray-blue of We Are What We Are, Mickle and crew really embrace the ripe pulp plot with succulent colors to match. It's a film of saturated neons, seemingly lit by stop and brake light, a melange of rich reds/yellows/greens and an occasional comic-book royal blue emanating as moonlight.

Jim Mickle's [laconic] thriller is a case of a filmmaker straining to decide on the subject of his movie. It swerves and twists and flails and back-flips like the best of 'em, but is seemingly unable to walk in a simple straight line. Instead of creating a work that's earthy, tactile and bubbling with Southern soul, Mickle has delivered a near-academic study of bungled narrative mechanics which demonstrates how over-intricate plotting can sap the life out of everything that surrounds it.

The film switches almost on a dime and falls into a rabbit hole of tiresome plot machinations involving a police cover-up, the Dixie mafia, and a snuff-film ring, all leading toward the flattest of emotional crescendos. While Mickle's compositions lose much of their verve in the film's later half, his regard for the analog does not—and at the expense of perspective into his characters' emotional torque.

This flaunting of bargain-bin accoutrements doesn't exactly match the grim stakes, but it does help to establish a sense of unpredictability and to make the story's outlandish plot twists seem possible, if not quite plausible. Mickle may be just playing with genre, but at least he approaches it with vitality, inventiveness, and pleasure.

Pulpy and fierce, Cold in July manages to overcome its drastic tonal shifts and its female-unfriendly nature—the film's one non-disposable woman, the protagonist's wife (Vinessa Shaw), is underdeveloped and unconvincing. But the acting in the film is exquisite, and matched in caliber by the direction, cinematography (by regular Mickle DP Ryan Samul), and writing...

Mickle borrows a lot, but he tends to borrow from the best, and he has a strong sense of when to stick to the expected genre conventions and when to gently subvert them. "Cold in July" is, like all of his work since his industrious, no-budget bio-terror debut, "Mulberry St." (2006), a modest, unpretentious exercise in old-fashioned thrills and chills, made with a level of care and craft that elevates it well about the fray.