Carl Franklin gives new meaning to "film noir" in this adaptation of a Walter Mosley mystery. Denzel Washington's Easy Rawlins, as the name implies, is not particularly hard-boiled; it's life in postwar Los Angeles that's hard, especially for blacks who came west for the wartime work in the aircraft industry and now find themselves laid off. So a veteran like Rawlins, trying to make the payments on his house, becomes a P.I. for the bucks, his being black drawing him into an intrigue involving some very wealthy, very white and shady local politicos. Easy is easily Washington's best work, and Franklin and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto capture 1948 Central Avenue, L.A., and something more: as Terrence Rafferty wrote in The New Yorker, "Mosley's detective stories are based on the witty perception that to be black in America is necessarily to be a private eye-to see what the larger society can't, or won't."