As an example of the second-­generation immigrant capitalist, Michael Corleone of The Godfather is difficult to forget. Francis Ford Coppola’s films follow him from idealist to reluctant pragmatist, a man who seeks to separate his family from crime only to find it becoming ever more enmeshed, even to the point (by the third film) of involvement in the Vatican banking scandal of the early 1980s. Writer/director J.C. Chandor’s setting of his superb moral thriller A Most Violent Year begins at that moment in New York when the Godfather films run out. His central character is Abel (Oscar Isaac), a man in his thirties with good looks to rival Al Pacino’s character. Abel, though, is of Hispanic origin; there is no organised crime dynasty in his background. Through hard wor