Writer-director Shane Atkinson's "LaRoy, Texas" is a deliciously nasty film in the style of early-John Dahl (especially his "Red Rock West"), with the grim humor of the Coen Brothers thrown in. This is the kind of southern pulp noir that grabs its audience by the hair and forces them down in the muck.

John Magaro is Ray is the definition of a pushover and a classic noir schlub; his older brother, Junior (Matthew Del Negro), treats him like his inferior even though the two supposedly own equal shares in the hardware business they inherited from their parents. Ray also learns that his wife, Stacy-Lynn (Megan Stevenson), is having an affair.

David Chase has gone from “The Sopranos” to taking a sixties-rock nostalgia trip with “Not Fade Away." It’s a film that knows its subject well enough, and even has E-Street Band member Steven Van Zandt to help pick the bluesy rock-infused soundtrack. And yet I don't know what I'm supposed to take away from the band focused on here. Doug (John Magaro) is a New Jersey kid inspired by The Rolling Stones, and girls, to start a band with

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL - “Sopranos” creator David Chase should be commended for choosing some of the most heavily-mined subjects in all of fiction for his feature film debut, “Not Fade Away.” It’s a nostalgic growing-up story set in the early to mid-sixties, chronicling—as did Barry Levinson’s “Diner” and “Liberty Heights” and television’s “The Wonder Years”— rock’n’roll and its countercultural appeal which swept over that