‘Motherless Brooklyn’ harkens back to the hard-boiled private eye tales of old

Posted on November 15, 2019

By MARK VIOLA

We don’t get much in the way of Westerns these days when it comes to films, but if there’s a popular genre from yesteryear even less common in modern day cinema, it is the old-school crime noir. You know the ones: a hard-boiled private eye provides gravelly voice-over narration as he investigates a mystery, all in stark black and white.

Aside from the fact that it is in color, that description perfectly fits “Motherless Brooklyn,” starring Edward Norton (“Birdman”), who also directed the film and wrote the screenplay based on the novel by Jonathan Lethem. Even outside the noir genre, we really don’t get many true mysteries in film, and even fewer good ones.

“Motherless Brooklyn” is not only an excellent throwback to the old hard-boiled mysteries of the past, it is a really great film, thanks to a tight script that keeps the story moving forward at a comfortable pace as well as a stellar lead performance from Norton himself.

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