First-Run Movies At Home!

The COVID-19 pandemic is hitting the movie industry hard — but no one is taking a more devastating shot than local independent theater owners. One such theater near you is now offering first-run independent films through streaming services that share their revenue with the theaters, just like regular theatrical distributors do.

Support your local theater. Here in Rehoboth Beach, DE, that's the Rehoboth Beach Film Society's Cinema Arts Theater.

See what they're showing HERE.

Movie Review

The Little Things

****

Rating: R

Run Time: 2 hours 7 minutes

Stars: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto

Writer/Director: John Lee Hancock

In theaters and streaming on HBO Max

You may have noticed that Denzel Washington makes less than one movie a year these days. His latest, The Little Things, comes more than two years after his last Equalizer outing, which arrived one year after Roman J. Israel, Esq., which turned up a year after Fences.

As one of those rare figures who manages to blend mastery of the screen actor’s art with the dazzle of pure movie star magnetism, Washington can’t help but draw special attention to his work, which with the possible exception of his Equalizer series is never disposable; never without meaningful subtext.

So when we hear Washington is playing an amalgam of the oldest tropes in the cop movie genre — a burnt-out, play-by-his-own-rules veteran who returns from exile to help solve that one murder case that got away from him — we know there’s no way this is going to spin out like some 1980s B-movie. And we’re right: Washington’s soft-spoken, easy-smiling officer with a growing paunch and an explosive temper is a bundle of contradictions, a crime solver driven by demons known only to himself and a handful of long-ago co-conspirators. As he proved in his Oscar-winning role as an alcoholic pilot in Flight, Washington is the kind of actor whose demeanor allows us to think we’re reading his character’s mind. Then he pulls back the curtain to reveal that, while we may have been half-right, we were also somehow all wrong.

Here he’s Joe “Deke” Deacon, a police force desk jockey in a dusty central California burg who finds himself running a department errand down to Los Angeles. It’s a bittersweet journey, because until five years ago he was the LAPD’s star homicide detective. He left that job after a spectacular and mysterious flame-out, but that does not prevent the department’s new rising star, a snappy-suited, fast-talking detective named Jim Baxter (Bohemian Rhapsody’s Rami Malek) from enlisting his help in cracking a particularly vexing serial murder case.

Mostly for curiosity’s sake, Deke tags along for READ MORE