“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.
