Check out photos and details on the latest concept from the Founding Farmers team.

Remembering the place where “everybody who was indicted because of Watergate” once dined.

Won’t someone bring back waiters on roller skates?

A large percentage of us spend our days in offices, so if a movie is going to spend much of its time there, it had better ring true. Lapses in accuracy about criminal underworlds might fly past us unnoticed, but lazy, fake workplace settings will take you out of the movie just as surely as a boom mike hanging in the frame or a reflection of a cameraman obviously visible in the mirror.

In the first half of Jean-François Richet’s sprawling, messy, and indispensible double-shot biopic on the life of Jacques Mesrine, the French criminal legend is a roiling cauldron of frightening intensity. He’s young, he’s on the rise, and while not every caper is a success, it’s still best to stay out of the way of this bull — even on his less-than-perfect days. When we leave Mesring at the end of that film, he’s just finished escaping from a Quebec prison, only to audaciously return with heavy artillery to spring some of his buddies as well.

In a hospital, awaiting the birth of his first child, notorious French criminal Jacque Mesrine — still a few years shy of that notoriety — is asked if becoming a father will change him. “Times change, not men,” he responds, “least of all me.” It’s the sort of hard-boiled line that one can hardly imagine anyone actually saying in real life, but Mesrine: Killer Instinct, is at least two degrees removed from reality. For one thing, it’s based on the famously self-aggrandizing Mesrine’s own sensationalized memoirs. Secondly, it’s a movie, and director and co-screenwriter Jean-François Richet puts a title card right up front reminding us that all films are at least partly fiction.

The first thing we see is a birth. Jacques Audiard opens his sprawling, intimidating new film not with a biological birth, but with a birth of character. He opens using a technique he calls “La Mana Negra,” in which he blacks out most of the screen except for one distinct image he wants to highlight, akin to the silent film technique of iris in/out, except that the area of Audiard’s focal point is movable…