A Walk Among the Tombstones

A cemetery figures prominently in A Walk Among the Tombstones, but it’s the metaphorical graveyard—a dying city, a culture of violence, moral rot—that proves haunting in the biggest ways in the film. It has a retired New York City cop (Liam Neeson) getting deeper and deeper into an off-the-books search for the perpetrators of a murder-kidnap scheme that targets the wives, lovers and daughters of local drug traffickers. Writer-director Scott Frank (working from the novel by Lawrence Block) maintains a scary kind of dramatic tension right from the start. Part of that comes from generic sources—vicious crimes, sadistic villains. But there’s a more complex and disturbing kind of suspense arising from the motley crew of variously unhinged characters attempting to track down those villains. Cinemark 14. Rated PG-13