Lawyers, Guns and Money: Roman J. Israel, Esq — An Occasional Series on Movies, TV and Other Stories About Lawyers and the Law 

The title character of Roman J. Israel, Esq. is a sort of walking anachronism, a man out of time in more ways than one. A civil rights lawyer who never entered the modern era, he rarely leaves his cluttered Los Angeles office, preferring to let his much smoother partner operate as the firm’s public face. His boxy suits and unkempt hair suggest a man who doesn’t care a lot about what others think. Then his partner dies suddenly, leaving his cases to a well-coiffed (and white) pragmatist. Roman decides he might just want a piece of the pie. And he’s willing to make some very bad decisions to get it.Of course we can’t take our eyes off Roman — he’s played by Denzel Washington who picked up one of his 10 Oscar nominations for the role — yet the movie was largely neglected by critics and at the box office upon its release in 2017. Though sometimes as baggy as Roman’s suits, it’s well worth rediscovering, particularly as a rich drama about the collision of ideology and reality, and as a great Los Angeles movie (something of a specialty of writer/director Dan Gilroy, who turned the city into a glimmering nightmare in…