Night and the City (1992)

A third-rate lawyer tries to make it as a boxing promoter.

The central performance is great and justifies the film, even though in terms of screenplay alone it is just the occasionally dull spectacle of a person's life going wrong in every possible way, not because reality is necessarily like that, or because this guy's personality attracts evil in some way (although this is somehow implied by the film, an unwarranted and overly pessimistical stance), but simply because the filmmakers chose to show a guy whose hopes are shattered. Knowing that this is based on a 1950 film, and even without having seen that film, I get the impression that that time frame is a much more believable one for this story and my comments might even not apply to it then.

Rating: 53