It’s taken almost a decade of professional filmmaking for Josh and Benny Safdie to get to their genre movie—their "tapehead classic"—but it’s good that they got to it now. They’ve slowly transitioned away from a predilection toward abstract and dreamlike characterizations, which were present in their student films, their early features, and even in their documentary film Lenny Cooke. Those first two narrative films each built to unreal moments where the lead character essentially confronts a symbol—in Pleasure, when a…

Prevenge is a movie about a pregnant woman’s murder spree; it also has punchlines. Sometimes they’re sharp and unexpected, as when Ruth (Lowe), the aggrieved mother-to-be, explains why she needed to kill an innocent witness to her crimes: “No one called Josh is not going to call the authorities.” In other cases, as when Ruth slits the jugular of a boardroom executive, those verbal rejoinders are dull enough to sound like deleted throwaways from an ’80s vigilante picture: “It’s a…