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‘The Last Stop in Yuma County’ Review: An Accomplished Pressure-Cooker Thriller That’s Like a Tarantino-Fueled Noir, 30 Years Later
In Francis Galluppi's lean, tight, and stylishly clever pressure-cooker indie thriller, two bank robbers take over an Arizona diner.
But “The Last Stop in Yuma County,” which contains nothing resembling a love story, is simply a movie about two small-time sociopaths who are killing time in a diner while waiting for a fuel truck to arrive at the adjoining gas station (where the pumps have gone dry). The first-time writer-director, Francis Galluppi (the name sounds European but he’s from Los Angeles), establishes his chops in the unblinking opening shot, which lasts for close to two minutes. While twiddling with the radio, he hears about the bank robbery (the fact that the men drove off with $700,000 in a green Pinto), and he then flips the radio onto a song that, to me, was needle-drop heaven: the 1968 Paul Mauriat version of “Love Is Blue.” I confess that this instrumental French ditty of tinkling rapture is one of my all-time favorite pop songs, and the film uses it in heavily ironic counterpoint, laying it over shots of an orange truck turned on its side, post-crash, dripping gasoline.
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