The Lookout

The Lookout (Le Guetteur, 2012) is a French crime-action film by Michele Placido you can watch online for the face-off between two heavyweight actors. Commissioner Mattei (Daniel Auteuil) has spent months chasing a crew of bank robbers. On the final job, a rooftop sniper starts dropping his officers one by one, never missing, buying the thieves a clean escape.

Mathieu Kassovitz plays the marksman, Nikos, and the hunt slowly curdles into something personal. An anonymous tip leads to the shooter, but he slips away to root out the traitor inside his own gang. Once Mattei learns whose bullet killed his son in Afghanistan, any pretense of cool police procedure is gone. Olivier Gourmet, Fanny Ardant and Placido himself round out the cast.

This is tight European genre filmmaking with none of the Hollywood gloss: a grey, overcast Paris, gunfights that are short and nasty, and a plot driven less by stunts than by the way Auteuil and Kassovitz size each other up. Anyone tired of polished blockbusters will likely take to its dry, hard edge. Stream The Lookout (2012) online on iFILM.