The title implies a straight-up action film like "The Departed"—which it's not, to the disappointment of many—and the poster suggests a late-breaking "Godfather" clone, which it kind of is. Oscar Isaacs certainly comes on like a young Pacino in the role of Abel Morales, an immigrant striver who's married the boss's daughter (Jessica Chastain, in vintage Armani) and taken over the family business—only it's fuel oil, not olive oil, and the setting is the grubby Greenpoint waterfront (a few miles upstream from Terry Malloy's "North River"), not Little Italy.

This solid, involving film is a genre all to itself—part old-school working-class epic, like "They Drive by Night" (1940; the one where Bogart and George Raft are truckers); there's a fabulous car/truck/subway chase reminiscent of "The French Connection" and some nice edgy scenes between Abel, who takes pride in taking "the path that's most right," and his wife, Anna, who wants to call in her Family (with a capital F) to take care of the inventory shrinkage that's bleeding their business dry. (Seems like w/d J.E. Chandor was trying for a less dysfunctional version of the spats between Christian Bale and Jennifer Lawrence in "American Hustle.")

A subplot involving Abel's protégé, a Latino driver who panics when things get rough, seems a little stagy and contrived, and the film loses some momentum in the final scenes, but all in all "A Most Violent Year" is well worth watching. Great performances, lots of familiar jowly faces from "Homicide," "The Sopranos" (see if you can spot Hesh as a bearded Brooklyn patriarch) and "Boardwalk Empire"; great locations and gorgeous subway graffiti.