#Boyz n the hood download movie#
Don Cheadle and Denzel Washington in "Devil in a Blue Dress." (Courtesy Brattle Theatre)Ĭheadle’s silver-toothed Mouse and his hair-trigger temper loom so large over the movie I always forget he doesn’t show up until an hour in. Director Franklin luxuriates in old-school techniques like a retro voice-over and lap-dissolve montages, making “Devil” look and feel like a film that could have been made in 1948, except of course for all the bad language, blunt sexuality and Black people. The lushest of the quartet, “ Devil in a Blue Dress” showcases Washington in fine, fast-talking form as a laid-off factory worker hired to find the missing girlfriend of a mayoral candidate who, we’re informed by Tom Sizemore’s bulky, insinuating fixer, has “a predilection for the company of Negroes.” A marvel of costume and production design, the movie brings classic Hollywood glamour to nightclubs and neighborhoods that never would have been permitted onscreen back when the film takes place. It’s a cozier fit than a lot of audiences at the time might have been comfortable with.
Classic noirs from the ‘40s and ‘50s reflected and amplified the anxieties of traumatized men returning to a changed America after WWII, whereas these ‘90s counterparts applied that sort of doomy, old-fashioned fatalism to structural social injustice.
#Boyz n the hood download series#
You couldn’t pick a better movie to kick off the Brattle Theatre’s “ African-American Neo-Noir” series this weekend, a collection of four terrific pictures from the early 1990s Black filmmaking boom that brought issues of race to the forefront of twisty, throwback crime stories. Director Carl Franklin’s mystifyingly under-appreciated 1995 “Devil in a Blue Dress” stars Denzel Washington as the smooth South Central private eye of Walter Mosley’s wonderful mystery novels, slyly sidestepping corrupt cops and blackmailed politicians with the help of his slightly psychotic sidekick Mouse (Don Cheadle) in a heavily segregated postwar Los Angeles. In a cinema landscape where everything’s a franchise, it’s infuriating that we aren’t on our fifth or sixth Easy Rawlins movie by now. Jeff Goldblum and Laurence Fishburne in "Deep Cover." (Courtesy Brattle Theatre)
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