Killing Them Softly (in theaters Friday)

“The man comes around,” sings the late great Johnny Cash in the moody trailer for this new crime thriller from Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), but in this case, it’s definitely not a man you want to stick around for.

The man in question is Brad Pitt who stars in this Friday’s Killing Me Softly as a mafia strongman charged with hunting down three young junkies who thought it was a good idea to rob a mob-protected high stakes card game. Their botched heist upsets the delicate criminal ecosystem of New Orleans and sends Pitt into action.

Based on the popular George V. Higgins novel Cogan’s Trade, Killing Them Softly is a stylish, meditative and unflinching ride through the crime-ridden gutters of an economically depressed Big Easy. Dominik populates this gangland genre picture with a string of usual suspects—James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Sam Shepard and Ben Mendelsohn among them—while Pitt holds the narrative together as the hired gun at the center of the ruthless hunt. Rated R.