Straight Time
Director: Ulu Grosbard and Dustin Hoffman
Year Released: 1978
Rating: 3.0
Dustin Hoffman manages to get out of jail and makes an attempt to fix his life, but after getting into trouble with his repugnant parole officer (the irreplaceable M. Emmet Walsh), ends up pulled back into the robbery game. The performances are uniformly wonderful and Hoffman, using that whole Method thing, sports the impassive gaze of someone who's spent a lot of time with his own thoughts - Theresa Russell is fine as his love interest, though her character's heart of gold is so enormous she should consider work as a missionary. To the film's credit, it manages to remove the glamour out of crime and show it to be the brutal world it really is as well as keep Hoffman's character human despite possessing many, many faults.
