Motherless Brooklyn’s lead performance recalls two previous Ed Norton outings: Primal Fear and The Score. In the latter two, Norton plays, respectively, a cold-blooded killer posing as a stuttering altar boy, and a thief posing as a mentally-challenged janitor; in the former, he plays Lionel Essrog, a private investigator with Tourette’s syndrome.

The key difference is that Lionel really does have Tourette’s and isn’t just pretending. In Primal Fear and The Score there is a performance-within-a-performance, with the character pulling a Sun Tzu and appearing weak when he’s strong in order to... read the rest.