The Informant ( Gibraltar )

An intense, character driven thriller, The Informant concerns a nearly lawless patch of land in a civilized world and the efforts of one man to stay alive while caught between people on both sides of the law who want to make names for themselves.

Gilles Lellouche ( Little White Lies , Tell No One ) stars as Marc Duval, a family man with heavy burdens and even heavier debts in 1980s Gibraltar, a hotbed of smuggling, illegal trading, and drug running that the French and the British are powerless to stop. To help alleviate some of his debts, he enters into a tenuous alliance with a hotshot French border agent (Tahar Rahim from A Prophet and The Past ) who turns Marc into a government snitch to catch increasingly bigger fish with increasingly dangerous results.

Playing like a more restrained, better focused, and far more intense version of the somewhat similarly themed David O. Russell film American Hustle , director Julien Leclercq delivers a gorgeous looking, slow burning suspense flick and political potboiler without devolving into melodramatics or unnecessary convolution. It’s helped along nicely by a sympathetic turn from Lellouche, confident work from Rahim, and a memorably sleazy Riccardo Scarmarcio.

Screens

Sunday, April 6 ^th , 4:30pm, The Royal