Motherless Brooklyn review: a brilliant, multi-faceted noir with the composure of an Edward Hopper painting

Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Edward Norton in Motherless Brooklyn

The best film noirs aren’t merely mysteries, but excavations – long, dark digs that break open the bone vaults of the past to find the roots of a present unease. Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn is just such a film. It slinks through the shadows of late-1950s New York with its collar pulled up against the cold, joining the dots in a conspiracy that’s as intimate and current as it is bygone and vast, while The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown swirl in its unquiet mind.