Entertainment

Watch The Trailer For Ben Affleck’s Slick Gangster Thriller ‘Live By Night’

The actor is back in the director’s chair

The last time Ben Affleck directed a movie, it culminated with him on stage at the Dolby Theatre accepting the Oscar for Best Picture. There's no telling if Live by Night, his follow-up to Argo, will be as successful, but based on its first trailer, it looks like Affleck has crafted a polished and ultra-violent Prohibition-era gangster movie.

Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, the son of a Boston police captain (duh) who returns home from WWI and gets mixed up in some good old-fashioned bootleggin' down in Florida. As these things tend to go, he shoots his way up the ranks, becoming a full-fledged crime Kingpin, albeit a tortured one. As for the women in his life, there appears to be three. Sienna Miller shows up as a femme fatale doubling as a flapper, Zoe Saldana is the one who has his heart, and a brunette Elle Fanning appears as some kind of spiritual leader with mysteriously bruised arms. 

Affleck adapted the movie from the Dennis Lehane novel of the same name, and it marks his last foray in mid-budget filmmaking before he directs and stars in the stand-alone Batman movie next year. Live by Night was originally scheduled to come out last year, but was pushed back several times for unknown reasons. It will be released wide on January 13, but thanks to a limited release this December, it will be a contender come awards season. Watch the trailer above.