The Ice Harvest

The Ice Harvest is a 2005 dark comedy that takes place on Christmas Eve. The Younger Son showed this to me one night when The Husband was out. This is definitely not a movie The Husband would enjoy, but I think this makes for a nice change. It stars John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton as ill-fated businessmen afoul of the mob.

trailer:



Slant Magazine opens their review by saying,

Small-scale in the best sense possible, The Ice Harvest proves that modest, workmanlike film noir need not be accompanied by hipster homages and ironic self-consciousness.

DVD Talk closes with this:

Tightly paced, consistently efficient, and completely, darkly entertaining throughout, The Ice Harvest is one of 2005's most annoyingly overlooked flicks, and it's a neo-noir heist comedy that I plan to revisit several times over the next few years. Maybe it's just that I've been so starved for a "grown-up" comedy that I'm affording The Ice Harvest a bit more affection than it deserves ... but I love nothing more than discovering a flick that got unfairly shafted during its theatrical release -- and then helping to spread the word to my fellow film geeks.

Roger Ebert says,

I liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal and spectacularly complicated ways to die.

EW gives it an A- and describes it as an "acerbic, unpretentious black-comedy thriller". It gets a score of 46% at Rotten Tomatoes.