Joaquin Phoenix descends into a hellish New York underworld in the haunting 'You Were Never Really Here'

Seven years ago, the gifted Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay made a bleak and unsettling domestic horror film titled "We Need to Talk About Kevin." Her latest feature, her fourth in nearly two decades, is a hypnotically grim New York crime thriller called "You Were Never Really Here."

Both movies are named after pre-existing source material, which makes it a sly coincidence that Ramsay has now directed two consecutive movies that confront the viewer with strong, declarative statements. The directness of those titles feels true to the arresting quality of Ramsay's cinema but also somewhat