Live by Night

A Boston petty thief (Ben Affleck, who also directed and adapted Dennis Lehane’s novel) rises in the Mob during Prohibition, winding up rum-running from Cuba through Florida. It’s all fedoras, blasting guns, flashy 1920s suits and dialogue hissed through gritted teeth in the kind of whispers that only self-serious movie actors and people in libraries ever use. Maybe pearly gems like “We all find ourselves in lives we didn’t expect” looked profound on Lehane’s pages, but they sound gaseous and campy when spoken aloud, and all the teeth-gritting and whispering of a decent cast (Sienna Miller, Elle Fanning, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, etc.) can’t put them over. Every one of the movie’s 128 minutes reverberates with phoniness—like Affleck’s character telling us in 1941 that there isn’t going to be any war. J.L.