'Love, Brooklyn' dwells in transition

Tale about a romantic triangle in a changing borough doesn’t venture deep enough.

- Review ROBERT ABELE

Sundance Film Festival CO-STARS Nicole Beharie and André Holland.

A tender city romance about about gentrification and Black melancholy, “Love, Brooklyn” brings together appealing actors and the charms of New York’s ever-changing borough into soft focus. It feels a little too carefully arranged to ever truly get under your skin as a modern-day affair about disillusioned hearts.

First-time feature director Rachael Abigail Holder's cinematic postcard to loss and mutability is an attractive tableau of aged brownstones and new hot spots, canopied streets and hilly parks. It’s also well-anchored to what producer-star André Holland — playing a blocked writer named Roger juggling relationships with two strong women — does best: a charismatic, deer-in-headlights sadness. But the movie stays in that postcard allure, never quite edging its earnest expressions of desire and anxiety into anything more stakes-driven or detailed, the way a love letter might rattle and console simultaneously.