A ★★★½ review of I Hired a Contract Killer

This feels like a difficult transition; whereas before in Match Factory Girl, Ariel, and Shadows in Paradise, Kaurismäki was working with a group of actors who seemed so perfectly and completely in tune with his sensibilities, here everyone seems to be coming at the challenge from a slightly off-kilter angle. Kaurismäki is stretching in a lot of ways; he's depicting a setting that's new to him, he's casting actors who are new to him, he's working in a language he hadn't done a full feature in before. It's all ultimately in service of watching Jean-Pierre Léaud build a character scene by scene, slowly finding things for his shattered salaryman to hold on to for (very literally) dear life. Still a great watch; Léaud is of course incredible here, but so is relative unknown Margi Clarke and long-tenured English character actor Kenneth Colley (you may recognize him as one of sundry imperial officers in Star Wars). And as always, Kaurismäki has this incredible property of holding your…