Film: God's Pocket (2014) Directed by John Slattery

Actors' directorial debuts tend to get snubbed - especially if the actor is a handsome man or a pretty lady. Examples abound. John Slattery's debut which he co-scripted with Alex Metcalf is based on an eponymous novel by Pete Dexter. The film feels like drama in its first half but then its genre gets confusing as dramatic situations are resolved violently in an absurdist manner reminding of the devices of the Coen brothers (Blood Simple). The social layer of the film is still prominent but it is stylized and deviates towards the lurid with its "metonymic" settings switching between the pub, the funeral bureau, industrial sites... The problem with the confusing genre stems from the novel itself - Pete Dexter's writing favors the sensational and the salacious over meaning and structure. "The Paperboy" (2012), also based on a novel of his, was a cinematic disaster. 

Given that, Slattery was actually able to convey more than the literary basis of his film - the picture oozes a kind of melancholic desperation which his low class characters couldn't possibly articulate.