Parents' Guide to Dragged Across Concrete

This violent, hypnotically slow crime drama is fairly pedestrian in its use of overwritten dialogue and underlit settings, but it's also more bracingly dangerous than most other movies. Director S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99) specializes in vivid, graphic pulp, perhaps influenced by David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino, but his films have a hardness that comes from somewhere beyond Hollywood. Even his titles -- like Dragged Across Concrete -- are more descriptive than the soft, generic examples we tend to get today. Zahler also uses his monolithic running times to powerful advantage, spending long minutes introducing a character simply so that her death is more meaningful; she's more than just a random passerby.

Many of Zahler's scenes consist of back-and-forths with characters talking, while concerns like the untrustworthiness of the media and the creeping gentrification of health food stores drop into the dialogue like unwieldy boulders. Dragged Across Concrete is also one of those dark movies that makes you wonder why people can't just turn on an extra light here and there. Racism is handled bluntly but not dishonestly; an African-American character played by Tory Kittles is perhaps the smartest one in the room. Ultimately, the movie's very slowness and quietness make all the wrongdoing and violence resonate a great deal more; as it goes, we consider consequences more than in any normal film. Rather than blowing by in a sea of bullets and blood, this one stays with you.