Metrograph

A singularly downbeat home-for-the-holidays movie, Baron’s grungy independently produced noir concerns solitary tight-lipped hitman, Frank “Baby Boy” Bono (Baron himself), embarking on a Christmas week assignment for the Cleveland mob in his old stomping grounds of Manhattan, his perambulations—and doomy inner life—accompanied by wall-to-wall second-person (!) narration courtesy the gravel-voiced Lionel Stander. A chilled-to-the-bone deathtrip trawl across the city, with destinations that include the old Penn Station, the Village Gate jazz club, the glowing display windows of Fifth Avenue, and the mafia boneyard that is the Jamaica Bay estuary, all photographed in melancholic monochrome by cinematographer/producer Merrill Brody, whose work hews closer to the semidocumentary style of Cassavetes’s Shadows than to the carefully sculpted Expressionist lighting of the studio-bound thriller.

Distributor: Universal