High school collides with hard-boiled film noir in the twisty, cunning
Brick. When he gets a mysterious message from his ex-girlfriend, a high school loner named Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt,
Mysterious Skin) starts to dig into a crisscrossed web of drugs and duplicity, eventually getting entwined in the criminal doings of a teenage crime lord known as the Pin (Lukas Haas), his thuggish henchman Tugger (Noah Fleiss,
Joe the King), and a mysterious girl named Laura (Nora Zehetner,
Fifty Pills).
Brick has not only the seductive, labyrinthine plot of a crime thriller by Dashiell Hammett (
The Maltese Falcon) or Raymond Chandler (
Farewell, My Lovely) but also a dense high-school version of hard-boiled lingo that's both comic and poetic. The movie unfolds with headlong momentum as Brendan manipulates, fights, and staggers his way through layers of high-school society. Gordon-Levitt is excellent; between this and the equally compelling
Mysterious Skin, he's left his
3rd Rock from the Sun days behind. Also featuring Meagan Good (
Waist Deep) and Richard Roundtree (
Shaft).
--Bret Fetzer
