The nineties

Well, I guess they made a couple of good films in the nineties as well. This is one of them: One False Move. Billy Bob Thornton is a ruthless killer. Him and his girlfriend and his partner are headed back to his hometown in Arkansas. What they don't know is that the town sheriff, Bill Paxton, and two cops from LA are waiting for them. Co-written by Thornton, directed by Carl Franklin.

It's a small masterpiece, a mix of modern film noir and a variation of High Noon. The story follows the two cops and Paxton, but also the killers and the woman as they are travelling south, slowly building tension. All of the characters seem real, none of them simply clichés. Paxton plays the kind of happy go lucky-guy he was very good at, but with a dark secret. It's a great, Oscar worthy performance. There is some violence in the film, and it's not pretty, but violence shouldn't be. The film ends in a calm, strangely poetic scene, that could easily have been too sentimental, but that like the rest of the film finds the right tone.