Having all but walked away from movies in exhaustion and disgust after finishing his last full-length feature Killing Me, local writer-director Henry Weintraub now returns to the cinematic fold with The Assassin, a compact gem of shoestring filmmaking. Shot in digital black-and-white and devoid of dialogue, this surreal short film about a low-rent, grungy killer is in many ways a return to Weintraub’s roots in slam-bang, low-budget auteurism, and the joy he rediscovered in the endeavor shows in every frame. “I think I’ve gone more back to guerilla,” Weintraub says of making The Assassin. “Every movie we did kept getting bigger, more tension. The problem with that is expectations grow. The pressure really started to build.” This time around, Weintraub says, he had virtually no crew; often it was just he and actor Patrick O’Driscoll shooting alone. “This one was way different,” he says of the new film. “We took our time. We made sure we were happy with every scene in the movie. This is what I envisioned it turning out like.” Watch The Assassin free online at http://531productions.com.