A Walk Among the Tombstones

A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) follows a former policeman who has stopped drinking and works without a licence. Matthew Scudder is not officially a detective; he does people favours and accepts gifts in return. A drug dealer asks for help after his wife is abducted and killed, and it turns out not to be an isolated case. The source is Lawrence Block's novel from the Matthew Scudder series. Block wrote seventeen of them, and Scudder's alcoholism is the spine of all of it; in the books he goes to meetings, and the film keeps that. Scott Frank wrote and directed. He is better known as a screenwriter, of Out of Sight and Minority Report, and would later make The Queen's Gambit. Liam Neeson leads, but this is not one of his post Taken action films; the pace is slow, the violence infrequent and the character exhausted. It is set in 1999 and uses that plainly: barely any mobile phones, a new internet, and millennium anxiety in the background. It runs 114 minutes. Good for: dark crime, protagonists dealing with alcoholism, and nineties atmosphere. Less good for: violence against women is at the centre and is described in detail, while the victims are not written as characters. The pace is deliberately slow and there is nothing here for anyone expecting action.