The one thing I find encouraging about Man on a Ledge (Summit, 1.13.12) is that the director, Asgar Leth, delivered a killer doc five years ago called Ghosts of Cite Soleil. The two things that give me concern are (a) Pablo Fejnves‘ heard-it-before, on-the-nose dialogue (“I am an innocent man!”) and (b) the fact that it looks and feels like a typical standard-issue urban thriller — i.e., the kind that tends to be released in January or February.

Ghosts of Cite Soleil is about two pistol-packing Haitian brothers who ran slum gangs during the final months of Jean Bertrand Aristide‘s presidency, and how things got worse for them after Aristide was deposed.

After seeing it in March ’06, I wrote that “I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom. In short, this excellent 88-minute film adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth.”