There’s nothing like a good whodunit, and it’s even better when there’s a clever gumshoe on the trail. Andy Garcia‘s Joe Diamond roams the streets of Downtown Los Angeles in a three-piece suit, hunting down cases as a private investigator and appearing as something of an urban legend to the denizens of the City of Angels. Putting on his director, writer, and producer hats, Garcia’s newest film, Diamond, is all polished suits and smooth jazz, but beneath all of that, there’s an unexpected twist that takes this slightly corny concept and turns it into gold.
Joe Diamond Is a Private Eye From Another Time
You might be fooled in the first minute of Diamond into thinking it’s a period film. Joe wakes up every morning, irons his handkerchief, puts on his suit and fedora, and takes the elevator down from his loft above a garage. With analog details, a jazzy melody, and Garcia’s own voice-over narrating his thoughts, it feels like we’ve stepped out of time until Joe goes to cross a street just as a Waymo car comes speeding down the road. To most of his friends and the people he comes across, Joe is an oddity, but a welcome sight. Los Angeles is full of characters, and after solving a recent case involving flamingos, Joe is a bit of a celebrity in town.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Polite, chivalrous, and keenly observant, it feels like Joe jumped right out of the pages of a dime store paperback rather than modern-day California. His most frequent associate is the detective “Danny Boy” McVicar (Brendan Fraser), who you could comfortably call Joe’s frenemy, especially when they end up on opposite sides of a case. Joe is hired by Sharon Cobbs (Vicky Krieps), the newly widowed wife of billionaire Randall Cobbs. Everyone thinks Sharon killed her husband, but Joe is determined to find out the truth, whether the police want him to or not. Along the way, he works with a coroner played by Dustin Hoffman, a barkeep/lawyer played by Bill Murray, and crosses paths with a powerful attorney (Danny Huston) and a major power broker (Robert Patrick).
Everything about Diamond feels plucked from a classic Hollywood detective noir. There’s corruption, there are cover-ups, there’s mysterious and gorgeous dames — Joe has a particularly good night with a mysterious woman known only as Angel (Rosemarie DeWitt) — and there’s a twisty mystery that makes everyone look suspicious. That alone would have made Diamond an enjoyable if slightly mawkish film. But in the third act, Garcia pulls back the curtain, and everything changes.
‘Diamond’ Turns Into a Different Movie by the Third Act, and That’s a Good Thing
Andy Garcia as Joe Diamond in DiamondImage via Cannes Film Festival
It’s all well and good to listen to Garcia’s dulcet tones narrating Joe’s daily thoughts with purple prose, but the film never lets you forget that even though people like Joe, they think he’s a little weird. From the Waymo to the selfies to vaping hotel receptionists, Joe simply looks out of place. This is especially true with characters like Danny Boy, who is always happy to remind Joe to step into this decade. But is Joe simply a guy who is nostalgic for the “good old days,” or is he a man wandering through a delusional life?
He takes his job too seriously for this all to feel like a prank or social experiment, and he never once implies that there’s something else going on beyond being a dogged investigator. However, in the third act, we — and Danny Boy — find out the truth about Joe and why he acts the way he acts. The reveal, without giving it away, puts all of his anachronisms into perspective. It’s a devastating and genuinely surprising moment, and it gives Garcia a chance to flex his acting muscles beyond brooding and looking mysteriously charming. As we learn who Diamond really is, we’re forced back into reality alongside Joe, and forced to confront ugly truths and long-buried trauma. It’s this twist, along with the less-surprising twist of who actually killed Randall Cobb, that really puts a neat bow on Garcia’s return to feature directing after 21 years.
‘Diamond’ Is a Tribute to Los Angeles and Hollywood
Diamond plays as a pretty clear tribute to Hollywood and the city of Los Angeles, making it one of those movies that also acts as a “love letter to the city.” Joe strolls through the Grand Central Market, cruises up the PCH, and takes the Angels Flight funicular with the aptly named Angel. From sprawling mansions to cozy little gardens, the film also doesn’t hesitate to show the way that Los Angeles, like so many other cities, only has a thin border between the ultra-rich and the common folk. Joe even manages to romanticize the nightmarish traffic going through downtown LA, an impressive feat for anyone who has sat in bumper-to-bumper hell on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
But Diamond isn’t just the Joe Diamond show. Fraser’s turn as the morally ambiguous and slightly scummy Danny Boy plays a fun contrast to Garcia. Although Danny Boy almost makes a mockery of Joe’s shtick, he seems to embody the classic trope of a crooked LAPD cop. Fraser eats up every scene he’s in, offering just the right amount of sincerity contrasted with smarminess to keep things interesting. And while the winsome Krieps shares a lot of time with Garcia as Joe questions Sharon to clear her name, it’s really DeWitt who steals the show as Angel. As her identity is revealed, every reaction she’s had and every choice she’s made suddenly make sense. Honorable mention should go to Demián Bichir for a small but crucial role as Alberto Echevarria, Randall’s gardener. It’s not easy to convey a wealth of emotion when you only have a few minutes of screen time, but Bichir manages it with ease.
Thanks to its star-studded cast, including Murray, Fraser, and Hoffman, Diamond will draw the attention of curious film lovers, but what really shines in this film is Garcia. Not necessarily his acting or his directing, though there are some particularly beautiful shots of Los Angeles that can’t be beat, but as a writer, Garcia proves that he’s not just a one-trick pony. It’s not groundbreaking storytelling; he’s not innovating anything completely new, but it’s a solid film (aside from a few meandering moments), one with a unique concept and a wholly original story that delivers on a strong conclusion. That, in itself, is a difficult task to get right, but Garcia exceeds expectations.
Release Date
May 19, 2026
Runtime
118 minutes
Director
Andy García
Pros & Cons
Andy Garcia shines as actor and director, but his main forte here is his screenplay.
Brendan Fraser plays a perfectly smarmy and corrupt police detective.
Garcia’s acting in the thrd act is particularly compelling.
The pacing can be difficult at the mid-poiint and while the story is interesting, it’s not exactly groundbreaking.
