Brooklyn's Finest
A crowded cast of some of the finest actors in cinema can't save the gimmicky, episodic, hit-or-miss script in Brooklyn's Finest, Antoine Fuqua's latest attempt to relive the glories of Training Day. Richard Gere plays a drunken burnout case with seven days to go until retirement. Don Cheadle is on his game as an undercover officer whose years hanging with drug dealers have cost him his marriage. And Ethan Hawke is an overwhelmed Catholic detective with too many kids, two more on the way, a wife made sick by the mold in their home and little hope of raising the cash to move. He has made the fateful decision to shoot and rob drug dealers to save his family. But for every tasty moment, there's another that is so comically over-the-top, so silly and arch, that the movie stops dead in its tracks. And it goes on and on -- over two hours of violence, raunchy sex and streetwise banter to get us to the moment when these three story threads connect.
A Single Man stars Oscar nominee Colin Firth as a gay university professor in Los Angeles, circa the early 1960s, struggling with the death of his longtime lover. Firth is excellent, but fashion designer Tom Ford's direction is fussy and mannered -- a Gucci ad come to life.
