\n\t\u201cForget it Joe, it\u2019s TikTok town,\u201d would have been a perfect closing line for Diamond, an old-school detective flick about a wisecracking private eye stuck sometime in the 1930s or 40s but forced to live like the rest of us in the digital present.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor his sweet and very tongue-in-cheek second stab at the helm (after the ill-fated 2005 Cuban drama The Lost City<\/a>), Andy Garcia<\/a> tells a throwback tale of dead rich husbands and citywide corruption that\u2019s straight out of Chinatown, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye \u2014 all classic L.A. noirs he pays due homage to here. If the novelty of his fish-out-of-water conceit eventually runs thin, Garcia brings it to a satisfying conclusion, in which a man caught in the past tries to claw his way back to the real world.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tDiamond\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n \tA nostalgic crime flick with heart.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) \n\tDishing out the kind of ratatat banter that would make Bogart proud, the 70-year-old Ocean\u2019s Eleven star plays Joe Diamond, a private dick who dresses in vintage three-piece suits, drives a 1940s Ford DeLuxe convertible and decorates his apartment like it was the setting for Billy Wilder\u2019s Double Indemnity. When he\u2019s not at home sipping bourbon and listening to old records, Diamond haunts the remaining vestiges of prewar Los Angeles: the Bradbury Building, where his equally retro office is located; Cole\u2019s French Dip, where a smug bartender played by Bill Murray<\/a> serves him shots and one-liners; and Grand Central Market, where at one point he stops by to pick up Chinese takeout.<\/p>\n \n\tDiamond is definitely not a man of our time, but he\u2019s forced to live in it, yielding some witty gags in which he nearly gets hit by a Waymo or has to fend off young followers who discovered him on social media. \u201cThe Flamingo guy,\u201d is what they call him, referring to the last case he cracked, which involved missing birds. His new assignment is straight out of Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane: helping a young femme fatale (Vicky Krieps<\/a>) suspected of murdering her significantly older mogul of a spouse.<\/p>\n \n\tWe\u2019ve seen this many times before, and yet the plotting in Garcia\u2019s script is clever enough to keep us guessing, even if doesn\u2019t exactly keep us on the edge of our seats. The director is clearly in no rush to spin this yarn, which can make the two-hour running time feel sluggish in spots, especially when the non-stop repartee doesn\u2019t always hit its mark. But there\u2019s also something heartwarming about this rather sincere exercise in nostalgia, which Garcia peppers with cameos by some of his acting buddies, including Dustin Hoffman<\/a> as a coroner comedian, Demi\u00e1n Bichir as a suspicious Latino gardener, and Danny Huston pretty much picking up where his father, John, left off in the 1974 Polanski film.<\/p>\n \n\tBrendan Fraser<\/a> is on hand as well, playing a jerky LAPD detective who keeps stepping on Diamond\u2019s toes, thwarting the private eye\u2019s shrewd attempts to crack the case. If Garcia\u2019s movie had limited itself to that investigation, it probably wouldn\u2019t have had two legs to stand on. But a more intriguing subplot begins to take over when Diamond crosses paths with a mysterious woman in white (Rosemarie DeWitt), leading to a denouement that unlocks the secret behind his refusal to acknowledge the present.<\/p>\n \n\tWithout giving that secret away, it\u2019s worth noting how Garcia uses it to add some genuine sentiment to a movie that otherwise feels more like a gimmick than a good story. You can tell this was a passion project for the star \u2014 in his teary-eyed speech after the film\u2019s premiere in Cannes, Garcia said he\u2019d been trying to get it made for 20 years \u2014 and that passion manages to come through in Diamond, which the director himself scored along with Cuban jazz great Arturo Sandoval (whom Garcia played in a 2001 Emmy-nominated TV movie<\/a>). He may no longer be of his time, and his movie may be mostly destined for folks in his own age category, but Garcia still has a thing or two to say about living and dying. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cForget it Joe, it\u2019s TikTok town,\u201d would have been a perfect closing line for Diamond, an old-school detective…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655483,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[155272,25088,45895,252484,32176,92131,88,206,58478],"class_list":["post-655482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-andy-garcia","tag-bill-murray","tag-brendan-fraser","tag-cannes-2026","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-dustin-hoffman","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-vicky-krieps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655482\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Cast: Andy Garcia, Brendan Fraser, Vicky Krieps, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Murray, Danny Huston, Dustin Hoffman, Demi\u00e1n Bichir
Director, screenwriter: Andy Garcia
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 58 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n