General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Q & A (1990 film)

Q & A is a 1990 American crime drama directed by Sidney Lumet, adapted by Lumet from a 1976 novel by Edwin Torres, a New York State Supreme Court justice. Nick Nolte plays Lieutenant Mike Brennan, an openly racist New York police detective under investigation for the purportedly justifiable shooting of a Latino drug dealer, and Timothy Hutton plays Al Reilly, the young assistant district attorney assigned to the case. Armand Assante co-stars as a flamboyant drug dealer.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Sidney Lumet, adapting his own screenplay from Edwin Torres's 1976 novel¹^•²
Principal cast	Nick Nolte (Lt. Mike Brennan), Timothy Hutton (Al Reilly), Armand Assante, Patrick O'Neal, Charles S. Dutton, Luis Guzmán³
Release	April 27, 1990 (United States); distributed by Tri-Star⁴^•⁵
Runtime and rating	132 minutes; rated R for profanity, graphic violence, and scenes with sex, drugs, and nudity⁴^•⁶
Producers	Arnon Milchan and Burtt Harris⁷
Reception	Metascore 66 (generally favorable); IMDb rating 6.6/10 from about 8,400 votes⁸^•⁴
Television version	Lumet was unhappy with the television edit and had his name replaced with the pseudonym "Alan Smithee"⁴

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens with Brennan cold-bloodedly murdering a man who drunkenly exits a club in a rundown part of town, then coercing two eyewitnesses to testify that the victim had a gun in his hand.⁶ Reilly, a former policeman and the son of a well-respected top cop, is assigned his first case: the police commissioner tells him it is a "cut and dried" case of justifiable homicide, and his politically ambitious homicide chief, Kevin Quinn (Patrick O'Neal), expects him to sweep the Brennan matter under the carpet.⁶^•⁵

Reilly's investigation instead uncovers a network of corruption and clannishness winding through drug-dealing Hispanics, Mafia connections, a Jewish shyster, and a liberal Jewish district attorney.⁵ The Hispanic drug overlord turns out to have a girlfriend (played by Jenny Lumet, the director's daughter) who once broke off a love affair with Reilly after seeing his reaction to learning that her father was black, a detail that forces the young prosecutor to confront his own bigotry.⁵^•⁹

Themes

Racism is the film's central subject. Lumet said of it, "Everyone — the Irish, the Italians, the Puerto Ricans — makes decisions, nurses antagonisms along racial and ethnic lines, consciously and unconsciously."² Stanley Kauffmann, longtime film critic of The New Republic, noted that the screenplay never discusses racism in dialogue; it simply depicts it, centrally and tangentially, beginning with a murder based on the idea of an inferior race and disclosing other kinds of clannishness as the plot untangles, with no rosy promise of improvement at the end.⁵

The film continued Lumet's long engagement with New York police corruption, following his earlier adaptations of true stories in Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City (1981).⁶ Film at Lincoln Center described it as a return to a favorite subject, corruption inside the New York City Police Department, and called it his best film of the 1990s.¹

Production

Lumet worked again with his longtime cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak, whose lighting ranged from police offices to gay nightclubs to luxe San Juan hotels, and with music by Rubén Blades, whose song "Don't Double-Cross the Ones You Love" appears on the soundtrack.⁵^•⁴ Filming locations included CBGB's at 315 Bowery in Manhattan.⁴ Nolte gained weight and adopted a slovenly look for the role of Brennan.⁶

Reception

Critical response was generally favorable. The film holds a Metascore of 66, with 20 of 29 counted critic reviews positive and none negative.⁸ Roger Ebert wrote that the movie works as a police thriller while probing feelings viewers may keep secret even from themselves, and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly called it "a major film by one of our finest mainstream directors."⁸ Peter Travers in Rolling Stone praised the casting and called Nolte electrifying; Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times called Nolte's turn his boldest, most spellbinding performance.⁸ Reviewers were less uniform on the film's messaging: the Deseret News critic found the delivery mostly heavy-handed, while Kauffmann judged the territory familiar but well re-entered.⁶^•⁵

The film was not popular at the time of release, and its poor box-office performance was noted in a 1991 Los Angeles Times report on Lumet's departure from a planned adaptation of What Makes Sammy Run?¹⁰^•¹¹ Retrospective assessments have been kinder; a later survey placed it among the substantial films of Lumet's later career.¹⁰

Availability

In the United States the film streams free with ads on YouTube, Plex, and Tubi, and can be rented from $2.99 or bought from $12.99 on Apple TV; it is not currently on a subscription service in the US or UK.¹²^•¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026