Nicolas Cage has plenty of rage in the trailer for David Gordon Green’s Joe

David Gordon Green’s latest, Joe, debuted to generally positive reviews at TIFF and Venice early last fall, with critics hailing it as another return-to-form for the director, along a similar path as Prince Avalanche. In the film, Nicolas Cage plays the titular, bearded logger, who harbors oceans of pent-up rage just below the surface. (“I know what keeps me alive is restraint,” he says.) The precociously brooding Tye Sheridan (The Tree Of Life, Mud) plays Gary Jones, a young kid looking for a job to support his abusive relatives. It all recalls the tone of Green’s films a decade ago—most closely resembling Undertow, another suspenseful and violent drama set in the rural South. For now, it appears that Green’s major-studio comedy phase—which began brightly with Pineapple Express, but quickly devolved into Your Highness and The Sitter—has given way to a resurgence of narrower, darker projects. Joe has a U.S, distributor, but as of yet no official release date has been set.