When Frank (Bruce Willis), a tough private eye, is murdered, his protégé Lionel (Edward Norton) decides to do something about it. But Lionel suffers from Tourette's and has trouble connecting with people and himself. Norton adapts and directs Jonathan Lethem's prize-winning novel, brilliantly navigating a tangle of betrayals, real-estate crime, and jazz set in the New York of the classic film noir era. The superb cast includes Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Willem Dafoe, Bobby Cannavale, Leslie Mann and Cherry Jones. Alec Baldwin plays a ruthless power-broker inspired by Robert Moses, and Michael K. Williams (Omar in The Wire) burns it up as a jazz trumpeter. Norton's second film as a director is an astonishingly rich blend of violence, tenderness and real-life sorrow, and his dance with Mbatha-Raw—to a song written by Thom Yorke and re-arranged by Wynton Marsalis—is unforgettable.

D: Ed Norton, US, 2019