Motherless Brooklyn

Director: Edward Norton

Country/Distributor: USA, Warner Bros.

Opening: November 1

Norton regrafts Lethem’s pastiche back onto the ’50s—there’s a Post reporter who says “fuggedaboutit” in the film’s cast of neo-noir revenants, and one scene is even staged in the old Penn Station.

SHOT ON BROWNSTONE STREETS dressed in fedoras, old sedans, and curbside heaps of ’50s junk—a past you can inhabit within the bounds of the frame, and no further— is not just nostalgic for the New York City it recreates, but fixated on the moment of its loss. Set on the cusp of the Dodgers’ move to L.A., this noir concerns old neighborhoods being rebuilt around car usage by master-of-the-universe developers. Notes from swirl like a saxophone solo as witnesses the birth of the city of the future and ponders the mystery of its parentage.