Dan Gilroy made his directorial debut with 2014’s “Nightcrawler,” and it was quite the start for an impressive helming career. It was sinister work, wicked all over, achieving a curdled sense of threat for what becomes an inventive contortion of a traditional serial killer/stalker story. “Roman J. Israel, Esq.” is Gilroy’s eagerly anticipated follow-up, and it definitely lacks the filmmaking authority and tension that made “Nightcrawler” so hypnotic. Gilroy returns to some elements of suspense and psychological imprisonment, but he’s a bit lost with the rest of the picture, which begins as a character study before transitioning into a routine legal thriller, eventually ending as some sort of messianic examination. It’s a mess, but “Roman J. Israel, Esq.” isn’t an unpleasant one, maintaining signs of life with turns of plot and the sheer force of Denzel Washington’s lead performance, which manages to buttress the whole endeavor.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com