In The Good Heart

In The Good Heart, Brian Cox plays a cantankerous cusser who owns a downtown NYC dive bar and a bad ticker. Paul Dano is the suicidal homeless waif-hipster he takes on as a protégé and business heir. The Big Apple of this evanescent tone poem is an invented nocturnal landscape featuring speechifying eccentrics and absurdist moments that feel northern European in sensibility. That may be because Iceland-bred writer-director Dagur Kári shot most of the picture in his homeland, loading a lot of distinctly Nordic seriocomic melancholy onto a study of two characters in a city that never sleeps.