Things got so bad that Deke fled town and got bumped-down in rank. A few years ago, Los Angeles Detective Joe 'Deke' Deacon ( Denzel Washington) was chasing this killer, and the case nearly broke him. The killer targets young women, brutally murders them, and then poses their corpses in artistic tableaus. There's a serial killer on the loose in California. There aren't a wealth of 1990s-themed references. To its credit, The Little Things doesn't heavily lean into its '90s setting.

Characters can't text each other computers are big, blocky beasts with green text and everyone's fashion sense is a touch dated. When Hancock first penned the Little Things script in the '90s, his story was cutting-edge and modern.

Now, after all of that, here comes The Little Things, a film that hopes to distance itself from its predecessors by becoming a kind of period piece. Titles like Fallen, Kiss the Girls, The Bone Collector, Taking Lives, and Suspect Zero, just to name a few. After Seven we saw the entertaining Copycat (which, to be fair, was in production at the same time as Seven), and bargain-basement knock-offs that stretched into the early 2000s. Whenever a surprise hit like this arrives, Hollywood immediately starts rushing to reproduce that success. Despite its unflinching darkness, gore-drenched crime scenes, and relatively untested director (Fincher made his bones in music videos, but his only feature before Seven was Alien 3, a derided film that Fincher disowned due to studio interference), Seven was a box office hit – the seventh-highest-grossing film of '95. But it was David Fincher's Seven in 1995 that really ushered in a boom. Jonathan Demme's acclaimed The Silence of the Lambs kicked things off in 1991, resulting in a masterpiece that swept the Oscars and remains beloved to this day. The '90s were a kind of renaissance for serial killer thrillers.

The little things rating review