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‘Diamond’ Review: Andy Garcia’s Nostalgic, Star-Studded L.A. Noir

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“Forget it Joe, it’s TikTok town,” would have been a perfect closing line for Diamond, an old-school detective flick about a wisecracking private eye stuck sometime in the 1930s or 40s but forced to live like the rest of us in the digital present.

For his sweet and very tongue-in-cheek second stab at the helm (after the ill-fated 2005 Cuban drama The Lost City), Andy Garcia tells a throwback tale of dead rich husbands and citywide corruption that’s straight out of Chinatown, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye — all classic L.A. noirs he pays due homage to here. If the novelty of his fish-out-of-water conceit eventually runs thin, Garcia brings it to a satisfying conclusion, in which a man caught in the past tries to claw his way back to the real world.

Diamond

The Bottom Line

A nostalgic crime flick with heart.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition)
Cast: Andy Garcia, Brendan Fraser, Vicky Krieps, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Murray, Danny Huston, Dustin Hoffman, Demián Bichir
Director, screenwriter: Andy Garcia

1 hour 58 minutes

Dishing out the kind of ratatat banter that would make Bogart proud, the 70-year-old Ocean’s Eleven star plays Joe Diamond, a private dick who dresses in vintage three-piece suits, drives a 1940s Ford DeLuxe convertible and decorates his apartment like it was the setting for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. When he’s not at home sipping bourbon and listening to old records, Diamond haunts the remaining vestiges of prewar Los Angeles: the Bradbury Building, where his equally retro office is located; Cole’s French Dip, where a smug bartender played by Bill Murray serves him shots and one-liners; and Grand Central Market, where at one point he stops by to pick up Chinese takeout.

Diamond is definitely not a man of our time, but he’s forced to live in it, yielding some witty gags in which he nearly gets hit by a Waymo or has to fend off young followers who discovered him on social media. “The Flamingo guy,” is what they call him, referring to the last case he cracked, which involved missing birds. His new assignment is straight out of Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane: helping a young femme fatale (Vicky Krieps) suspected of murdering her significantly older mogul of a spouse.

We’ve seen this many times before, and yet the plotting in Garcia’s script is clever enough to keep us guessing, even if doesn’t exactly keep us on the edge of our seats. The director is clearly in no rush to spin this yarn, which can make the two-hour running time feel sluggish in spots, especially when the non-stop repartee doesn’t always hit its mark. But there’s also something heartwarming about this rather sincere exercise in nostalgia, which Garcia peppers with cameos by some of his acting buddies, including Dustin Hoffman as a coroner comedian, Demián Bichir as a suspicious Latino gardener, and Danny Huston pretty much picking up where his father, John, left off in the 1974 Polanski film.

Brendan Fraser is on hand as well, playing a jerky LAPD detective who keeps stepping on Diamond’s toes, thwarting the private eye’s shrewd attempts to crack the case. If Garcia’s movie had limited itself to that investigation, it probably wouldn’t have had two legs to stand on. But a more intriguing subplot begins to take over when Diamond crosses paths with a mysterious woman in white (Rosemarie DeWitt), leading to a denouement that unlocks the secret behind his refusal to acknowledge the present.

Without giving that secret away, it’s worth noting how Garcia uses it to add some genuine sentiment to a movie that otherwise feels more like a gimmick than a good story. You can tell this was a passion project for the star — in his teary-eyed speech after the film’s premiere in Cannes, Garcia said he’d been trying to get it made for 20 years — and that passion manages to come through in Diamond, which the director himself scored along with Cuban jazz great Arturo Sandoval (whom Garcia played in a 2001 Emmy-nominated TV movie). He may no longer be of his time, and his movie may be mostly destined for folks in his own age category, but Garcia still has a thing or two to say about living and dying.   

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One Night Only Writer, Producer Talk Movie’s No Premarital Sex Rules

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Ever since the official trailer dropped for the Callum TurnerMonica Barbaro rom-com One Night Only, quickly racking up millions of views on its way to its nearly 40 million total, internet commentators have had a lot of questions about the film’s central premise in which premarital sex is illegal apart from one 12-hour period a year.

How is this law enforced? Are people breaking the law? How did this legislation pass? What counts as “sex” under this new mandate? Are marriage (and divorce) rates skyrocketing? What about affairs?

Rest assured: Some of those questions are answered in the movie, and explanations are starting to trickle out online for those unconcerned about spoilers. Beyond that, One Night Only writer, Travis Braun, who saw his screenplay top the 2024 Black List, has answers, but they’re not all in the Will Gluck-directed Universal movie now in theaters.

“I set out to write a movie about the circus that is modern dating, and I thought how fun if we could set that all in one night, and I have answers to those questions, and some of them are in the movie,” Braun told The Hollywood Reporter at the One Night Only premiere earlier this week in New York.

Braun said he definitely thought about the specific rules of the film’s alternate reality, framed as three years on from the no-sex act being passed, but didn’t want to get too deep into the politics of the world of the movie.

“There’s a big mythology that I’ve built out and then as you develop a movie you start to pare down and you go: What does an audience really care about, and what are they showing up to see? For me the answer is always a love story, romance,” he told THR. “I hope they can come in and we’ll show them how this world functions, and then they can just enjoy the movie and have fun. The whole focus of this was love story and romance first, and the world-building obviously has to make sense and has to be there, but ultimately we weren’t interested in getting into the politics of it. We wanted to tell a story about these two incredible people trying to find love on this crazy night.”

Producer Jacqueline Monetta, who brought Braun’s script to Gluck, said they didn’t want moviegoers to have all of the answers.

“I had a million questions. I was like, ‘What does this mean? What does this world look like? How do people communicate? What’s different?’ And that’s I think what’s so smart about it,” she said of One Night Only‘s “big idea, high-concept” premise. “We don’t answer every question in the movie, purposefully, because we want those questions to be had on the car ride home. We want people to keep talking about it and really think about what would this mean for our world, what does it mean for our world now. But I think Will and I were really specific on what questions we wanted to answer.”

In a recent Reddit AMA, Gluck also detailed how he and his team approached the world building of the movie while not wanting it to be all about the mandate and offered prospective moviegoers hints for where to find the answers to their questions.

“We spent a lot of time talking about the rules of the world, and if you’ve seen the movie, or when you see the movie, you’ll see that the rules of the world and the world building are all in the background,” he said. “It’s on TVs, signage, in thrown-away lines, because we didn’t want to give the world short shrift, but we didn’t want the movie to be about that. It’s another way I want people to see this. If they see it more than once, they’ll pick up so many more rules of the world in the background. A lot of the questions that I’ve been getting after people have seen the movie are actually answered in the movie, which is by design because I want people maybe not to know them. So, yes, it was a tricky tightrope to have them there, but not for the movie to be about it.”

Turner meanwhile echoes Braun’s advice for curious prospective moviegoers: “Go see the film!”

“You’ll realize pretty quickly what the realm is that you’re working within and it’s a comedy,” Turner says of what inquisitive filmgoers will find. “There are no great political undertones, I don’t think. This is just a place where you can escape for an hour and a half, two hours and enjoy and laugh your head off.”

One Night Only is now in theaters.

Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro at the One Night Only premiere on Monday.

Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Universal Pictures

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Dwayne Johnson Reacts To Live-Action ‘Moana’ Negative Reviews

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Although the live-action remake of Moana hasn’t quite been able to catch a wave at the box office, Dwayne Johnson is proud of what they made.

The Golden Globe nominee said the Disney movie’s negative reviews, which currently sit at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes, are “just the way it goes” in the entertainment industry, and what “really mattered” was that “the culture really stood up” in the Polynesian-inspired tale.

“Our first two reviews came out. I’ll never forget it… They were amazing. I was like, wow,” he told People, noting the reviews then “went another way, as sometimes happens.”

“That’s just the way it goes because we’re in this business,” added Johnson.

A decade after he voiced the demigod Maui in Disney’s animated film Moana, Johnson reprised the role in the Thomas Kail-helmed live-action adaptation.

'Moana' live-action trailer
Catherina Laga’aia in ‘Moana’

“The challenge was, okay, let’s remember, though, what’s going to be beyond this opening weekend. Let’s remember what’s happening right now and the noise that’s happening right now,” said Johnson. “If you love it, great. If you don’t, no problem.”

Following Moana‘s July 10 premiere, the movie has gone on to make $266M at the global box office. Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro addressed the low turnout in a letter to shareholders.

“Even when our franchise films don’t meet our box office expectations, as with The Mandalorian and Grogu and the live-action Moana, our investments in these core properties fuel other parts of our company,” said D’Amaro, noting that Moana is “expected to be a strong title on Disney+, building on the success of the original film, which is one of the most streamed movies of all time.”

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‘One Night Only’ Director Understands “Sex Purge” Comparisons

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While One Night Only is intended as a romantic-comedy, there are some obvious dystopian undertones that audiences can’t ignore.

Director Will Gluck recently addressed online comparisons between the Purge franchise and his new Universal rom-com, which is now in theaters, about two New Yorkers (Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner) who meet on the one night a year premarital sex is legal.

“I am very aware of the online discourse about this world and this movie being the ‘sex Purge,’ and rightfully so,” he told SlashFilm. “But I don’t want this movie to be about that. And I know I get some blowback going, ‘How could you make a movie about this not being about that?’ Because I love exploring characters and situations.

Gluck added, “Whenever us humans get put in situations, no matter how or why the situation happens, we still have to be humans and get through the day. And that’s what interests me. So we didn’t want it to overwhelm. We wanted to explain it. We didn’t want to take a side. We wanted to show both sides, but we wanted it to be about these two people going through this crazy night.”

With five movies and a TV series expanding on the universe since The Purge premiered in 2013, the Blumhouse franchise is set in an alternate reality where all crime, including murder, is legal one night a year for 12 hours.

Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro in a scene from the movie One Night Only
Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro in ‘One Night Only’

In a similarly dystopian fascist universe, albeit with a much lighter mood, One Night Only follows recently dumped pizzeria owner Owen (Turner) and singer Allie (Barbaro) meet on the one night of the year premarital sex is legal under the United States’ “chastity mandate.”

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