Live by Night (2016)

Ben Affleck directs himself in a Prohibition-era crime saga that moves from Boston to Tampa's Ybor City, where a bootlegger named Joe Coughlin builds a rum empire, murders a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and eventually builds houses for the poor. The production is handsome. The suits are excellent. The film, however, arrives with the weary air of a project green-lit on reputation and finished on a schedule.

On the matter of representation, the Cuban community of Ybor City is woven into the setting, with Zoe Saldana and Miguel in supporting roles, though the camera never leaves the white Irish-American protagonist for long. Elle Fanning's Loretta and Sienna Miller's Emma are given arcs and flashes of agency inside a story that remains a male gangster chronicle. The Klan functions as the villain, targeting immigrants and Cubans, and Joe's campaign against them is bloody and satisfying. It is also period-accurate historical texture, not a modern sermon. The film has no interest in climate, body image, neurodivergence, or queer lives. It has no interest in queerness of any kind, which for a 2016 gangster picture is simply the default.

The economic imagination on display is entirely criminal and entirely uncritical: rum, casinos, narcotics, and a late turn toward charity that reads as personal penance, not political argument. Loretta's pulpit denunciations of drink and gambling supply the only moralizing, and even those are undercut by her private confession of unbelief. The result is a film that gestures toward social texture without committing to any argument, a well-tailored misfire that asks nothing of its audience except patience.