Killing Them Softly

This may seem like a crime movie with a lot of violent action, and in point of fact it is, but only by fits and starts. For roughly two-thirds of its running time, this brash drama is mostly a matter of tangled conversations between criminals of one sort or another, each of them variously involved in the central story—the misbegotten hold-up of an underworld poker game and the efforts of a hit-man/enforcer named Jackie (played by Brad Pitt) to clean up the resulting mess. It may be neo-noir at its core, but quite a lot of it has at least one foot in something like Theatre of the Absurd. Cinemark 14. Rated R.