Elmore Leonard — cinematically, perhaps the most influential writer of the 20th-century whose name never gave rise to an adjective — casts a long shadow over Jeffrey Reiner’s film, a satisfying LA noir that follows his legacy almost to the letter.
There’s no chiaroscuro here, nothing bad happens even remotely in darkness, but there’s a moral shading that Leonard would most likely enjoy.
For some reason, though, these sunshine-crime stories never seem to stick like their shadowy counterparts do, which means that Lake George might have to wait a while before it finds out where it sits in the whole noir canon.
Reiner’s script leans into a lot of traditional crime-movie tropes, and it begins with an ambiguous one: Don (Shea Whigham), a middle-aged divorcee, has just been released from jail after 10 years inside.
Read more on deadline.com