Cool Jazz is playing on the record player. In addition to the suit, the pocket square is also freshly ironed. The accessories are neatly laid out on a tray – and before leaving the apartment, the day is started with a third glass of whiskey. What makes the look perfect, however, is the fedora – the classic men’s hat that Humphrey Bogart once established as the epitome of the mysterious noir hero. No question: This Joe Diamond (Andy Garcia) actually looks like one of those anti-heroes from the dime detective novels that were immensely popular, especially in the 1920s. But then Joe steps onto the street – and is almost run over by an autonomous taxi.
Andy Garcia not only stars in “Diamond”, he also wrote the screenplay and directed a feature film for the second time after “The Lost City” in 2005. Before the world premiere in Cannes there was only the one scene below this paragraph – so no wonder everyone thought it was a Period piece. The audience was just as surprised by the taxi as the protagonist himself. Although the title character seems to have lost time in time by almost exactly a century, he is still no joke – on the contrary, he is actually surprisingly successful with his methods.
With this pre-released film still, it’s no wonder that before the world premiere everyone thought “Diamond” was set in the 1920s.
The case of a kidnapped flock of flamingos has made him a social media star, even though he doesn’t even know what TikTok is. LAPD detective ‘Danny Boy’ McVicar (Brendan Fraser) also has nothing but respect for Joe, especially since he found a hotel guest who had been missing for weeks dead in the water reservoir on the roof of the house. But then the private detective is hired by the mysterious, sunglasses-wearing widow Sharon Cobbs (Vicky Krieps). She is suspected of murdering her wealthy and violent husband in the pool house – and Joe is now supposed to find out who is really behind the crime.
In the best “Chinatown” style, he comes across a far-reaching conspiracy involving real estate speculation in which, among others, the lawyer Bruce Tenenbaum (Danny Huston) and a mysterious power broker (Robert Patrick) seem to be involved. Fortunately, Joe can rely entirely on the support of his lawyer/bartender Jimbo (Bill Murray), his secretary Elizabeth (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), and his friend, medical examiner Dr. Leaving Harry Kleiman (Dustin Hoffman). But then a mysterious bar acquaintance (Rosemarie DeWitt) threatens to throw Joe completely off track…
100 percent old school
“Diamond” is a film in which form and content mesh perfectly. Words like “TikTok” come up again and again – and yet it’s not Joe who seems out of place here. When choosing locations in Los Angeles, Andy Garcia obviously concentrated on only using locations that have actually changed little to nothing in the past 100 years. “Diamond” thus fully engages with its main character’s own world of perception – after all, we hear his typical noir voiceover throughout, in which he ponders, in a rough, lived-in voice, primarily about his ambivalent relationship to the City of Angels. It’s not Joe and his fedora that are the foreign objects, but rather the baggy-dressed tourist extras who stroll past here and there in the background.
Unfortunately, Andy Garcia isn’t the best writer, especially when it comes to dialogue. The exhausted, laconic voiceover is nowhere near the smoky poetry of the great genre role models – and Joe’s dry comments are all mildly entertaining rather than particularly biting. The case isn’t particularly exciting or even cleverly constructed – and yet you still enjoy watching “Diamond” because it comes across as so modest and unobtrusive and Garcia seems to be having a good, relaxed time with his old buddies like Dustin Hoffman (“The Graduate”) or Bill Murray (“Ghostbusters”). And then there’s the one really big twist that we really didn’t see coming – but here too, a lot of emotional punch is left behind with awkward, drawn-out exposition monologues.
Conclusion: A star-studded noir tragicomedy that is equally old school (=charming) and old school (=beautiful). The term “the dad movie par excellence” has already been used for “Diamond” – and this classification actually sums it up pretty well, although in this case it doesn’t necessarily have to be understood as the insult that it was probably originally intended to be.
We saw “Diamond” at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it had its world premiere as a special screening.