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)
