Who are we kidding, though? This movie is a coat that has been hanging in the closet for decades waiting for Washington to slip it on. Malek as Jim Baxter, a zealous and ambitious Los Angeles detective flirting with career and personal catastrophe, is pretty good too.

That the apparent bad guy is played by Jared Leto doesn’t necessarily help matters.īut Leto, as a self-confessed “crime buff” with a creepily calm demeanor, isn’t bad.

This one rises to a slightly higher level, though it doesn’t entirely avoid the clichés of its genre: “You know, you and I have a lot in common,” a suspect says to one of the detectives. You might think of “Se7en” or “Zodiac” or a lost season of “True Detective,” though this movie is less self-consciously stylized than any of those.Īt their best, those movies are competent rather than groundbreaking - admirable in their sturdy commitment to filmmaking craft even as their stories stubbornly cling to convention. It broods over the psychologically and spiritually damaging effects of police work as its two main detectives (Rami Malek alongside Washington) pursue an elusive, malignant murderer of women. Written and directed by John Lee Hancock and starring Denzel Washington as a weary professional with keen instincts and a battered conscience, “The Little Things” is an unapologetic throwback. When it comes to spooky neo-noir resonance, it’s hard to beat a ringing pay phone on an empty nighttime street or an envelope full of Polaroids. It seems mostly like a pretext for removing cellphones, internet searches, GPS tracking and other modern conveniences that might ruin the analog ambience needed for an old-fashioned serial-killer thriller. There aren’t many historical details or period flourishes that would justify this choice. At first, I thought this meant that the action would quickly vault forward into the present day, but instead the movie, which takes place mainly in Los Angeles, settles into a fairly generic version of the semi-recent past, occasionally flashing back to a few years earlier. A note during the first scene in “The Little Things” - an effective cold opening, full of danger and suspense - indicates that it’s 1990.

Best police movie