Motherless Brooklyn

Looks great and is well acted, but the pacing is turgid

I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelettes without breaking eggs.

• Robert Moses; Open letter to Robert Caro, refuting many of the claims in Caro's bio...

It's a difficult task to pace a noir for a modern audience, and you can feel the two and a half hour runtime. The story is interesting and the parallels to America in the present day are welcomed, but there isn't enough tonal balance to contrast all the shadowy moodiness. The plot is on the more con...

Motherless Brooklyn’s lead performance recalls two previous Ed Norton outings: Primal Fear and The Score. In the latter two, Norton plays, respectively, a cold-blooded killer posing as a stuttering altar boy, and a thief posing as a mentally-challenged janitor; in the former, he plays Lionel Essrog,...

Motherless Brooklyn’s lead performance recalls two previous Ed Norton outings: Primal Fear and The Score. In the latter two, Norton plays, respectively, a cold-blooded killer posing as a stuttering altar boy, and a thief posing as a mentally-challenged janitor; in the former, he plays Lionel Essrog,...