Flawless

A stylish, offbeat mixture of character study and crime thriller, with a couple of bravura performances in the two key roles—a drag queen played by Philip Hoffman, and a tough ex-cop played by Robert De Niro. The latter recovers from a stroke with the special help of singing lessons provided by the former, as meanwhile a huge bundle of stolen drug money vanishes into the ramshackle hotel the pair shares. Writer/director Joel Schumacher brings layers of gritty realism to all this, but there’s no concealing the rather maudlin and transparent moralizing which the film wears like a support-group name tag.