99 Homes

A man (Andrew Garfield) gets evicted from his house by a real estate shark representing the bank (Michael Shannon). He ends up taking a job from the agent out of desperation, and gets involved in evicting people himself.

Michael Shannon is Hollywood’s best bad-guy and so watching him do his thing here was always going to be a pleasure, even if his character is a little two-dimensional.

The cockiness in letting the guy you evicted become your protégé within a day is so believable in a character whose sole talent is identifying opportunities to exploit people. Why would you trust the guy that you just fucked over? Because you know what he wants and you have what he wants, so you own him.

99 Homes uses the 2008 crash as a backdrop to its central tenet—if you aren’t screwing someone over, you’re the one getting screwed—then amps it up until too many moral boundaries get crossed. The line between good and evil is always somewhere in the rear-view mirror before you even had a chance to see it coming.