Killer Joe, Venice Film Festival Review (Evening Standard)

He may have just turned 76, but director William Friedkin shows with Killer Joe that he has lost none of his desecratory verve.

He's made some bad decisions and been plain unlucky with some of his better ones since The French Connection and The Exorcist put him up there with Francis Ford Coppola as one of the angry young men of New Hollywood.

But with Killer Joe, a black comedy thriller adapted from a play by Tracy Letts, Friedkin seems to have recaptured some of that youthful energy.

In fact, there are scenes in this gutsy, sexy, violent film that out-Tarantino Tarantino, and may even test the censors.

The story focuses on Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch from Into the Wild), a debt-ridden loser in post-recessionary Texas who takes on a hitman to kill his own mother.

Chris lives in a trailer with his none-too-bright beer-swilling father, trashy stepmother and sister Dottie - a dreamy teen princess, gamine and vulnerable. British actress Juno Temple (Atonement) gives a mesmeric performance, neatly ducking the danger of twee preciousness that lurks in the role.

The film's standout turn though comes from Matthew McConaughey as Joe, the well-spoken, well-dressed, clearly psychotic cowboy cop who moonlights as a hitman, and agrees to take on the contract if he can have Dottie in lieu of payment.

Terrific casting, fast-paced hip-hop editing and the fag-end-of-America New Orleanslocations pull it all through to a corker of a final scene.