VENGEANCE IS MINE

Like director Michael Roemer’s prior features—the powerful civil-rights-era landmark NOTHING BUT A MAN and the offbeat mob comedy THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY—his continuously surprising, cuttingly incisive family drama VENGEANCE IS MINE emerged from decades of neglect to be heralded as a lost masterpiece of American independent cinema. Brooke Adams delivers a revelatory, multilayered performance as Jo, a troubled woman who returns to her family home in Rhode Island to confront her childhood demons. There, she becomes unexpectedly embroiled in the simmering domestic discord next door. Bringing vérité naturalism to a seemingly melodramatic premise, Roemer crafts a miracle of novelistic psychological insight that, as it unspools, reveals ever-greater depths of human understanding.