“A Most Violent Year” stars Oscar Isaac as, pretty much, a brooding Michael Corleone trying to go straight in the heating oil business in New York’s outer boroughs in 1981. Isaac plays a Colombian immigrant who has worked his way up to the point where he’s on the verge of buying a huge storage facility and dock, but his trucks are getting hijacked, the DA is looking through his records, and his bank is getting antsy about loaning him the money to complete his deal. His wife (Jessica Chastain) keeps suggesting her mobster father and brother could help him out with some muscle, but, as he repeatedly enunciates in his Guys-and-Dolls-like contraction-free English, he wants to play it clean: “I have always chosen the path that is most right.”
(Of course,...